Triple Slay — Lawrence Lariar

After television's hottest singing star goes missing, detective Steve Conacher follows a trail of glitter, glamour, bodies, and blood to find her.
 
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.
 
With knockout curves and killer chords, nobody sells a song like Mari Barstow. Destined for stardom and eager to make the grade, she's poised for the big time. So it doesn't make sense that she'd disappear a few short days before headlining a high-paying, career-changing television spectacular. Unless the publicity-hungry belter is just looking to tease the gossip trade.
 
Steve Conacher sees a more sinister angle to Mari's vanishing act. He can't help it. Not with the spurned lovers in her party-girl past, the vindictive enemies she used to claw her way to the top, and her hot-shot TV director being stabbed to death. And it won't be the last murder in Conacher's skip trace gig. Now Conacher had better find Mari and fast, before she makes ink in the obits.
 
Triple Slay is the 8th book in the PI Steve Conacher Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.