One Dead Debutante — Heywood Gould

Corpses make good copy, so it's a headline jackpot for Josh Krales, crime reporter for the New York Event, when he lurches onto a multiple hit in a Greenwich Village brownstone...

The star deceased, skewered to the front door, is a long-stemmed looker of the billionaire variety -- Pammie Sue McClough, daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Pammie Sue was riding high in very mixed company, and Josh is on the glittering trail she left behind. He's traveling from Little Italy--where he just misses becoming Pulitzer pizza in a mob bakery--to Harlem, where the guys and dolls are buying into the big time. It's a cocktail of old bucks and nouveau greed, white dust, dark angels, and wise guys more dangerous than most. Krales is playing a lone hand against muscle and money, until it all comes down in a sharecropper's field in South Carolina. Now he has to rethink his strategy, fast--or he's one journalist who's as dead as yesterday's news...