New Releases by Kin Platt

A wonderfully imaginative blend of "buddy book" with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug," complete with ghosties and ghoulies and big strong English bulldogs that go bump in the night. Well, only one English bulldog, but there is plenty of Sinbad to go around. Throw in some highly inventive puzzles and code breaking, a hero who is smarter than he thinks he is, a friend with a "million candlepower brain," and assorted bad guys of various levels of toughness, and you have a thrilling, funny, int

When Donald Lawson, successful mystery-story writer, is murdered, suspects include almost everyone who ever knew him. He was a man who had no friends and deserved to have none. After his death, it was discovered that he had abandoned his wife, betrayed his friends, and double-crossed every human being he had ever encountered. The only one who ever had a kind word for him was his editor, Molly Mellinger, supposedly the number one mystery editor in New York. It is she who helps Detective Boos of the New York Police Department track down every clue and muddle through to a solution—but not before there is another murder. Suspects include: Irinia Corning, Molly’s beautiful assistant, who had been involved in a homicide several years earlier and had hidden that fact very successfully until now—a fact which Lawson had been about to reveal. Two night club entertainers who make a specialty of insulting comedy, one of whom had a reason for being jealous of Lawson and who was a fantastic mimic—which may have helped to establish an alibi. Donald’s upstairs neighbor, an almost midget-like man, with a weakness for very tall sexpots. A very tall sexpot, who had been Lawson’s girlfriend and was currently mixed up in Oriental mumbo-jumbo. Complications pile up endlessly, and Molly herself is in deadly peril before the surprising solution is reached.

The games are tennis and murder … and private eye Max Roper has a bevy of beautiful tennis competitors to turn his head when he goes after the murderer of lovely Aussie tennis star Wendy Cliff. It was set up to look as if it was one of her opponents in the Los Angeles ladies pro tournament who did it—Wendy was garroted by a piece of tennis stringing. These include all the lovely women athletes who are taking part in the international competition. In addition to the local aspirants, the usual collection of current and ex- champions, there is the Italian start who boasts the most devastating-looking legs Roper has ever seen, the cuddly young Russian doubles pair, the beautiful French star, and their various friends and countrymen who hate to see them lose. Just to complicate Max’s problem, there is a fighting liberal senator from California threatened by a fanatic guerilla group of international assassins with whom Roper is waging a long-time personal vendetta. In the course of his investigation (as usual, filled with risk and violence), other murders follow. And Roper, pursuing the blood trail, quickly has his own life to worry about. Max has to go to the limit with his special brand of endurance and fighting character before he can come up with the winner and bring the murderer along. "

Max Roper is one of the new-fangled breed who includes murder in his arsenal of security activities. In The Pushbutton Butterfly, he has to track a missing girl through a myriad of fascinating, violent, and potentially evil people, including an idealistic student rebel at Berkeley; the most fashionable of gurus; young coeds who augment their income by pushing heroin; a motorcycle gang leader who is flying high all the time; and a staid, liberal pillar of the Establishment who secretly collects pornographic pictures. Roper is a compelling man who carries his own standards of behavior into every society he encounters. He fits best with the local police who are his friends, with an aspiring Mr. America, whom he can throw with karate, indeed with all types of evildoers and guardians against evildoers. He’s an adaptable fellow, though, and manages to get on well—when he has to—with millionaires and murderers of all classes. The Pushbutton Butterfly begins when Max Roper’s boss, head of an organization called EPT, sends him out to investigate the report of a missing girl, a security project. EPT, an offshoot of a wartime operation, occasionally does top, top secret jobs for the CIA and other legal espionage groups. In this case, the girl’s father is manufacturing some highly important electronic gadgets, and there’s some danger that pressure could be exerted o him through his daughter to release secret formulas. The father, who is understandably inimical to Roper’s presence in the case, gives grudging cooperation. The girl is a student at Berkeley, and there Max goes to learn what he can from her friends. He finds one of them almost immediately, an attractive girl whose charms are not improved the condition in which Max finds her, which is very dead. From this opening, there is no letdown to the pace and excitement of The Pushbutton Butterfly, Max Roper’s first case, a provocative introduction.

Felix Witter is the reigning Mr. Universe. He is in training for the current international body-building competition—just another dedicated weight lifter with extraordinary muscular development. He is murdered during his last workout on the day preceding the annual competition, and it just so happens that the murder takes place in the gym where Max Roper does his exercising. Lucky for the innocent gym attendant who is accused of dropping a quarter-ton of iron on the Superbody, because Roper is on hand to clear up the murder and prove who really did it. Roper has to sift through the co-ed part of the gym, including a few of the exercising ladies and their reasons for wanting Witter deader than alive. Also in line for lively suspicion are jealous competitors, last year’s losers and this year’s aspirants. Felix Witter, the victim, has a broken marriage behind him, a disgruntled business agent, an irascible trainer, a jealous girlfriend, a jealous boyfriend, and a tie-in with a nutrition product and a company unable to meet his demands for more money before he goes over to a rival health-kick group. What with karate experts, weight lifters, body builders and college athletes using the gym for work-outs, obviously Roper has a lot of strong men to deal with this time, and he is forced to fight for his own life before he can come up with the killer.

When millionaire jockey Willie Rich is murdered immediately after winning the $100,000 Princess Stakes, his old friend Max Roper, successful investigator, decides to find out who-dunit. It was set up to look like an accidental death--Willie drowned in his own pool--but Max didn't believe that. Fortunately for him, he is very much at home in the environs of a race track, because the person who might have wanted Willie dead was going to be one of the diverse people who are the usual habitués of a track: touts, gamblers, jockeys, trainers, rich horse owners and their wives and women, and even stableboys on the make. Max discovers that Willie had found a diary that pointed the finger of an earlier murder at someone who had kept right on covering his tracks. That someone, he figures, had to be among the following cast of characters: Ty Clayton, rich oil man, whose horses Willie rode. A man with a passion to win and an ungovernable temper. His wife, Monica, who had once been a magnificently beautiful movie star and who had run through four husbands, several fortunes and part of her looks. Was she being blackmailed? Kilburn, Willie's agent, who was shrewd enough to get away with murder and who had been heard arguing with Willie just before the death. Pam Clayton, Ty's daughter, who had disappeared when Willie's body was found. Tom Hunter, recent arrival from Acapulco, who was around the race track asking some very curious questions and backing them up with muscle. Then, of course, there was Penny, Willie's wife, who had liked Willie's money but very little else about him; and Johnny Cashio, the syndicate torpedo who like everything about Penny. And Joe Zale, who might have been jealous enough of Willie to do him in. And there are were also the people from Monica Clayton's past: Charnock, who dispensed psychic truths to adoring audiences and counted Monica among his most ardent disciples. Was he blackmailing her, or was it his secretary, Dorn? Someone, among this fantastic cast of characters, manages to involve Max in considerable personal jeopardy and violence before he triumphantly brings the murderer to book.

Max Roper is compelled to use all of his resources to stay alive long enough to last through the mystery of The Kissing Gourami. What starts out a fairly simple and even downgrading assignment, quickly becomes an obsessive search for a brutal killer, leading Roper a skill-numbing chase from Los Angeles to the glittering gambling casinos of Las Vegas, and finally to the chilling temple of marine biology. Max has to deal with the murder of a beautiful blonds by some ingenious unfriendly fish, and thus meets a handsome young golf pro with one eye out for a brunette heiress with hundred million dollars and the other for a shapely redhead who plays with sharks for kicks; an unforgiving acid-mouthed sports reporter; a designing matador; an erudite marine biologist who lost a leg and gained a lifelong enmity; a college cutie who moonlights at a tropical-fish aquarium when she isn’t out with a spear-gun killing things; a giant, hulking mad sculptor who used logs for playthings; and over all, the creeping menace of the vengeful animal-like first string executioner of the Las Vegas underworld, Big Vince Geneva. The Kissing Gourami starts when Max Roper’s boss, head of the EPT security organization, assigns him to find a ten-thousand-dollar missing dress. In this instance, Max is motivated not merely by duty, but by the gnawing thought that he might find a girl inside it, one whose specifications are mind-blowing enough to warrant his putting his life on the line for it. Max finds out what he knew before, that things are seldom what they seem, and a person can get himself severely beat up and even killed trying to dispute the point.

Max Roper, durable investigator, is sapped, doped and imprisoned on a boat apparently used by a mysterious Oriental for business purposes. The point of this caper is to have Max carry a warning to basketball superstar Jo-Jo Gonzaga that he must throw the championship play-off. When Gonzaga is shot and killed in his own fabulous and eccentrically designed home after his team wins the second game of the series, Roper decides to find the hoods who had abducted him. Max discovers that a lot of people wanted Gonzaga dead and that there is more to this murder than the gangland routine of forcing a team win at any cost. For example: Jules Belmont, miserly millionaire who likes to bet and bet big. He also hates to lose—a bet or a dame. Sandy Shaw, a bright and sexy whiz kid who can beat the computer in her specialty of voice prints. Larry LaSalle, her boss, resident expert at UCLA, the man who had designed the computer which can identify any person from his speech patterns. Barbara Belmont, niece of Jules. A hippie girl who lives at sea and tries to keep Roper the same. Frankie Wu, a shadowy Oriental who may be part of an international heroin-smuggling ring. Then there are the other characters Roper knows only as The Rube, Gorilla and Wolfman. He trails this trio to Mexico, where more violence erupts. Then the trail leads back to a beautiful blonde singer in the Gaslight Club in Los Angeles, where there is more violence. There is Tom Power, the ex-basketballer, a man who remembers the favors Gonzaga had done for him. Not to be forgotten among this provocatively mixed cast, are the Great Danes who owned by Gonzaga. Roper has a feeling they will be in a the final kill and only hopes he can beat them to it when he brings down Gonzaga’s murderer.

Big Bill Stanwood is a lost man since his beloved wife, Katie, died. He has left his job in the homicide division of the Los Angeles Police Department; detective work has no interest for him anymore But Bill must keep the promise he made to Katie. He must travel to Ireland, find his wife’s younger sister Noreen, and bring her Katie’s blessing. After unsuccessfully seeking her at an old address in Dublin, Stanwood arrives in Rosslare, the tiny town where the sisters had been born. He considers it a lucky coincidence that Noreen is there—working in the hotel where he’s staying. She greats him with delight, then runs off to an appointment, promising to meet him later. And Stanwood never sees her again until her battered body turns up on the hotel’s golf links. The instinct of his twenty year profession stirs within him, and Stanwood doggedly sets out to find Noreen’s killer. His search sends him to the fringes of Irelands violent political factions, where he uncovers another murder which puts him in dire peril of his own life.

Big, brash, good-looking Hondo Kenyon is one of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ best pitchers, a southpaw screwballer with the necessary skills and fastball to keep the opposition from tearing his head off, and the team is counting on the ex-small town Pennsylvania boy for help in their pennant run. On the other hand, Kenyon rates as a screwball in more ways than one. He has a long track record as a scoring jock with the ladies and his antics on or off the field are flamboyant and daffy, executed with lunatic fervor, sometimes funny of bordering on the ludicrous, always certain of coverage by the media. With a reputation like that, it’s no big surprise to a lot of people when Hondo turns up dead in the electrically charged water of a condominium swimming pool. Slip Masters, the team’s public relations man, calls on his private investigator friend Max Roper to look into the case and find out for sure whether it was a legit accident or perhaps a crafty and ingenious murder. The Los Angeles cops have crossed off Hondo’s death as a weird accident, but Slip isn’t so sure. Neither is Max Roper, especially when he gets in closer and starts kicking things around and his investigations turn up some odd circumstances and a string of other murders. As Detective Lieutenant Camino of Homicide says, “On a Roper case they die on the hour, like flies. Death follows Max like a plague.” Roper has plenty of leads to follow: disgruntled ballplayers, jealous boyfriends, discarded lovers, the dead man’s new-breed agent, a psychiatrist, a pool-maintenance person, a hippie plastic surgeon, condominium neighbors, some gangland types, a rock musician and a pineapple heiress ex-wife, among others. His travels take him from the baseball locker room to the seedy areas of Venice, a factory turned nightclub, exclusive watering holes, a chic tennis club, a new high-rise office complex—in short, a cross section of Los Angeles. Along the way to solving the case, Roper get shot at, arrested, beaten up, held at gunpoint and hit over the head, not necessarily in that order.

Sixteen-year-old Oliver Puckle, news gatherer for the Concord Freeman in the summer of 1846, has his work cut out for him when word arrives of a gruesome murder at Walden Pond. It seems the only citizen who is not a suspect is the poetphilosopher Henry David Thoreau, who spent the night locked in the local jail for refusing to pay his poll tax. As Oliver leads the charge to unravel the mystery, he has much to learn from his colorful neighbors – among them Ralph Waldo Emerson and a feisty teenage Louisa May Alcott – but unexpectedly it is the recluse Thoreau himself who provides particular help to the investigation. This posthumously published novel, set in the famously literary town of Concord, Massachusetts, is rich with intrigue and witty detail and features a foreword by the author's son.

Big Max, the world's greatest detective, must travel to the land of Ah-Ah-Achoo to find the king's missing pet giraffe.

Dr. Jekyll, a brilliant scientist, is transformed by a self-administered drug into the twisted Mr. Hyde, the incarnation of evil. Presented in comic book format.

Steve Forrester, the only witness to a kidnapping that doesn't seem to have occurred, sorts through a medley of clues to solve a mystery in his Long Island town.

A mentally disturbed 16-year-old girl begins to come out of her self-absorption and confusion when she becomes involved with the drug-addicted son of her psychiatrist.

A 15-year-old attempts to bring his fierce temper under control.

Fifteen-year-old Lee Hunter finds both his badly needed part-time job and his chances to become number one school miler threatened by the unscrupulous actions of a jealous teammate.

After her parents' divorce and father's suicide, an eleven-year-old causes misery in the family by her hostile reaction to her mother's new husband.

Big Max, the world's greatest detective, helps the zoo keeper find a missing moose.

A teenage boy tries to find a way of surviving in his bleak and violent city neighborhood.