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Lawrence Lariar

Johnny Amsterdam, Manhattan’s toughest private dick, takes it hard when his favorite nightclub chanteuse books a playdate with murder.

When popular cartoonist Lawrence Lariar decided to moonlight as a mystery writer, creating comic book artist turned amateur sleuth Homer Bull was a natural. From the 1940s through the 1960s, Lariar continued to switch from sketching caricatures to sketchy characters, writing hardboiled crime fiction under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight, Michael Lawrence, and Marston La France, and creating a series of memorable gumshoes. Now his classic whodunits are available as ebooks.

Working out of Times Square, PI Johnny Amsterdam has met a lot of endangered hard-luck souls. Warbler Kay Randall wasn’t one of them. With the looks and voice of an angel, she didn’t deserve a knife in the heart as a swan song. Only when Amsterdam sets out to find her killer, does he realize the sweet recording star might have had a flip side.

How else can he explain such a bevy of gal-pals? Like Jordice, a swinging hat check girl who could be bringing out the worst in any number of men; Serena, a kinky, hopped-up, trigger-happy nightmare in black lace who likes to play rough; and Norma—freaky, painted like a doll, perpetually pickled, and dancing with death, she digs morticians.

From grungy Greenwich Village pads to the dicey Brooklyn piers, lone wolf Johnny Amsterdam is on the prowl. But this is New York after dark. He’s also the prey.

Naked and Alone is the 1st book in the PI Johnny Amsterdam Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

The PI Johnny Amsterdam Mysteries

Naked and Alone

Bruising Manhattan PI Johnny Amsterdam finds a twisty link between a debauched artist, a Hollywood glamour girl, a beatnik singer, and murder. 

When popular cartoonist Lawrence Lariar decided to moonlight as a mystery writer, creating comic book artist turned amateur sleuth Homer Bull was a natural. From the 1940s through the 1960s, Lariar continued to switch from sketching caricatures to sketchy characters, writing hardboiled crime fiction under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight, Michael Lawrence, and Marston La France, and creating a series of memorable gumshoes. Now his classic whodunits are available as ebooks.

Johnny Amsterdam is up to his neck in trouble when he says yes to the sister of a war buddy. Sandra Tyson, a real-gone headliner at a Village dive, is in a panic over her friend Helen. The recently relocated fashion model, naïve to the ways of the Big Apple—and all its lecherous worms—was found beaten and brutalized in her apartment.

The investigation takes an even nastier turn when Sandra’s estranged father, wealthy King of the Comic Strips, enters the fringe. Sandra’s been wanting her deserved share of his fortune, and she was in cahoots with Helen to get it. When daddy-o is murdered, Amsterdam has to find out who among the richnik’s circle of sycophants, bodyguards, rivals—or long-lost relatives—did it.

All the private dick knows for sure is that there are more motives to murder than money, and the victims in this case have as many secrets as the suspects.

I Like It Cool is the 2nd book in the PI Johnny Amsterdam Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

I Like It Cool