Pay-Off #5

A luxury liner goes down in a storm, and when a young woman is pulled from the wreckage, she's mistaken for an international embezzler—one who deliberately switched identities with her before the ship sank. Now she's got to convince the police of the truth while the real criminal escapes, leading to a desperate chase that hinges on one telltale detail: a pair of red shoes.

A theatrical star meets a deadly end when poison strikes backstage, and Inspector Flow of the Homicide Squad must untangle a web of suspects with plenty of reasons to want Floradora out of the way—from her neglected understudy to her estranged husband who keeps demanding money. With fingerprints on the poisoned glass, conflicting alibis, and secrets lurking in a dead actress's diary, the detective races to expose a killer hiding in plain sight among the theatre's cast and crew.

When Prosecutor Drowling is found dead in his kitchen during a dinner party, an inspector must untangle alibis from a group of guests who claim no one left the house—but a careful examination of footprints and freshly waxed floors reveals a murderer hiding in plain sight. A prosperous businessman's attempt to craft the perfect alibi unravels under the weight of small, overlooked details that point directly to his guilt.

A man's moment of rage—throwing his welding gloves out a window to silence noisy cats—becomes the frame for murder when a pawnbroker is killed that same night, and the gloves bearing his initials are found at the crime scene. Joe Dante is arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, but Detective Avery begins to wonder if the evidence tells the whole story. As the electric chair looms, one determined cop races to uncover the truth before it's too late.

Claims adjuster Danny Thomas's fiancée Laura brings him a wild lead: a mysterious little man in a bowler hat claims to know where Lobo, a 1933 armored-car robber, has hidden the legendary Deuce of Pearls—black gemstones worth a quarter million that Northwestern Insurance has never recovered. When Danny meets the informant at a dingy hotel, he arrives to find the man dead, shot by a small-time killer in a green suit, and soon discovers that Lobo's former cellmate at Statesville Prison was the dead man himself. Now Danny must follow a twisted trail through the criminal underworld to uncover which of the old convicts holds the key to the pearls' whereabouts—and whether he'll live long enough to claim the reward.

Private detective Michael Rand takes on a sinister case when financier Preston Gilmore hires him to stop a killer targeting the members of an exclusive college fraternity called "The League of the 10,000"—a group that pools $10,000 annually, with the richest member collecting the entire sum on the youngest member's birthday. As deaths among the league members pile up in increasingly suspicious ways, Rand moves into Gilmore's Long Island mansion to stand guard, but discovers that someone may be playing a much deeper game than anyone realized.