Counterfeit Wife is the fourteenth Mike Shayne novel, first published in 1947 by Davis Dresser, the original Brett Halliday, a house name later used by a number of different writers. This PI novels begins with Shayne relocating his office to New Orleans and his secretary Lucy Hamilton quitting on him, but neither fact has much to do with this story, surprisingly enough. By wild coincidences, Shayne stumbles on a number of different schemes and, as the bodies keep appearing, one stabbed, one suffocated, one bludgeoned, one with his face ripped apart and burned to a crisp, he becomes a prime suspect. Between following an Amazonian blonde to being imprisoned by a gang of hoods and walking away from a car wreck, Shayne's adventures never cease in this book. This is a crisp, well -written PI story that is a fun quick read, just what Mike Shayne novels were supposed to be. What I liked about it was that the storyline kept me interested and it was true to its 1940s PI genre. It didn't matter that Shayne never had a client or that the the New Orleans business was nothing more than a red herring.
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