It seemed more a case for a psychoanalyst than a detective when hysterical Phyllis Brighton - rich, beautiful, and barely out of her teens - tried to hire Mike Shayne to watch her, because she was afraid she was going to murder her mother.

But when Mike got a load of the set-up at the Brighton mansion, two things changed his mind: a slimy private secretary named Montrose, and a phony doctor whose theories began where Freud's left off.

Both of them were just a little too anxious to convince the stubborn redhead that Phyllis was "a very sick girl."

And Mike Shayne was a man who liked to make up his own mind.