A hep female reporter combs the back-alley Bohemian bistros of Greenwich Village looking for a beatnik killer- Can you dig it? 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. Newspaper gal Sugar Shannon is New York City's top tabloid dream girl. But her latest scoop has a personal edge. Sugar's friend, George DeBeers, an avant-garde abstract painter so young and so talented is now so dead-knifed in the short ribs. So who among his coffeehouse crowd wanted the hot new artist to cool it? There's an Amazonian hooker as eager to give a client a bounce as she is to roll him; a boy-crazy Zen poet and easy target for the vice squad; a former stripper gone legit, pouring joe at a village dive; and a moody sculptress carving out her own niche in the art world. One of these cats may have had their claws out for George, but now that Sugar's on the case they have to cover their tracks. That means an offbeat killer is in Sugar's shadow, and her deadline may be closer than she feared

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