Death Was the Echo — Lauran Paine

Lauran Bosworth Paine (1916 - 2001) was an American writer of Western fiction. Paine wrote over 1000 books, including hundreds of Westerns as well as romance, science fiction, and mystery novels. He also wrote a number of non-fiction books on the Old West, military history, witchcraft, and other subjects. Because his publishers only accepted a limited number of books under a single author's name, Paine adopted dozens of pseudonyms. Many of his books, published by Robert Hale of London and distributed solely in the UK, have only in recent years been appearing in the United States, usually as large-print editions. This is one of those books. It tells the story of Reg Forster, John Blaine and Captain Ben Hastings of the Wilshire Division's Homicide Bureau of the LAPD. The discovery that a simple shooting murder was part of a subversion and espionage ring was a shocker. They were strictly homicide detectives, not spy-catchers, but before the last corpse was left lying, all three of them had become spy-catchers, albeit unwitting and unwilling ones. Reg Forster also encounters a beautiful woman, and two more who were not as beautiful, along with an assortment of former Nazi Germans. He got all the action he wanted, but only once was obliged to use his homicide training. Murder, in the espionage business, was only incidental. Forster discovers this the hard way.