Love for Sale: A Gideon Lowry Mystery

Katy appears at Gideon's Duval Street home, one of the last private residences amid a cacophony of T-shirt shops, motels, and restaurants, to engage his services - as a private eye. She confesses she has something that doesn't really belong to her: a jewel-encrusted gold chalice from one of the old Spanish ships now being salvaged off the coast. Frightened yet defiant, she's wary of divulging more. A day later Katy's dead, sprawled on the linoleum floor of her shabby trailer, the open oven spewing gas. In her last disjointed phone message Katy said she got rid of the treasure; the cup is indeed nowhere to be found. When Gideon last saw her alive, in the club where his piano soothes weary hearts with Gershwin and Porter, she'd been arguing with a man Gideon didn't recognize. Now that man - Joe Delgado, deputy to treasure salvor Brendan Scott - is sitting white-knuckled in Gideon's wicker chair, anxious to hire him to clear up the mystery of Katy's death, and to find the missing chalice.