PAUL PINE runs a one-man private detective agency in Chicago. He has learned the game in the State's Attorney's office in that city and he is an experienced and able investigator. But no amount of experience could prepare him for the aftermath of the bizarre and deceptively gentle episode that opens Halo in Blood.

On his way to see a prospective client, Pine gets snarled up in a funeral procession. Before he can extricate himself, he is forced to serve as an unwilling and impatient witness to a funeral—a funeral with no mourners, twelve ministers to conduct services, and a corpse known only as John Doe!

Later, Pine's new client, the wealthy John Sandsmark, engages him to break up an affair in which is beautiful stepdaughter Leona has involved herself. It is the latest in a series of unsavory affairs for her, and Pine can see that the job may be tricky. Still it seems safe enough.

It isn't. Either because of Leona Sandsmark's low taste in gentleman friends or because of Pine's presence at John Doe's funeral, a number of people take an uncomfortably acute interest in the private detective's activities—a big-time gambling operator, a lieutenant of the homicide detail, a smooth stranger with twenty-five thousand dollars, a stick-up man, somebody with a blunt instrument and a few others who keep in the shadowy background. Before the pattern becomes even partially clear, Pine takes considerable pushing around (which he resents), several clips on the jaw and one solid slugging. On at least two occasions somebody plans to kill him.

Still, battered as he is, Pine is comparatively lucky. The late John Doe had died violently. A second killing takes place only a few yards from where Pine sits watching. Another victim falls dead almost in Pine's lap. Two more die in pain and blood with no witness but their slayer. This is no game for petty stakes; this is murder, open and unashamed.

Doggedly Pine gropes toward a solution through a maze of love and greed and hatred and sudden death. The late John Doe is in it somewhere, and something that takes on a far greater meaning to Pine than a successful solution of his case.

Halo in Blood is a tough story of a tough city. John Evans gives it distinction with a relentless pace and a strong literary quality that make the book more than just another whodunit. Paul Pine is worthy of a place beside such characters of detective fiction as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade.

[They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What Mr. Chandler thought when Mr. Browne said as much to his face is forever lost to time.]