This is nice cover work for Nick Quarry’s 1960 crime caper Till It Hurts. It was painted by Barye Phillips, and clues in readers that there’s a show business backdrop to the tale. It’s not Hollywood, though—it’s New York City’s television industry, with a double dip into the jazz music scene. The story follows private eye Jake Barrow as he wanders into an alley where a man is being brutally beaten by three organized crime thugs. It turns out the victim is a private eye too, and he was being warned off a case. He takes the message to heart, and basically leaves his client in Barrow’s lap.

The client is Loretta Smith, who wants to prove that her musician husband was framed for murder, then in turn murdered by cops to cover up the frame. Despite the professional beating he witnessed, Barrow gets talked into the case and immediately focuses his attention on one cop in particular who lives in implausible luxury on a yacht. It’s a dangerous gambit to try to prove a cop is a killer, and those perils quickly mount to untenable levels. Barrow has a little help though—his pal and sometime lover is an undercover cop named Sandy, who’s separately investigating drug connections in the Manhattan jazz scene. Maybe there’s a link between her case and Barrow’s.

This was a good book. It moves fast and has a nice cast of characters, including a now-grown child actress Barrow was in love with when he was a kid. It becomes clear early that the bad cop angle isn’t a red herring, but that’s fine. The yacht-ensconced villain is so mean and deadly that no subterfuge is needed to keep reader interest, as strategic maneuvering between opposite sides and bursts of action lead up to a kinetic climax. We learned that Till It Hurts is entry four in a Jake Barrow series, so we’ve got the first book winging its way here via international mail. But this one stood alone just fine.