HARDY was a very private eye who preferred sex to slaughter, and classy cuisine to common crime. Pleasure before business was his motto, and the only way he got entangled in the case of a murdered beauty named Dorothy Robbins was when her lovely, loving sister Peg made Hardy a proposition he couldn't turn down.
At first the caper seemed right up Hardy's alley, as he moved through a New York underground of call girls and strippers, probing for...