Pull up a chair and relax.

We'd like you to meet Glenn Bowman, one of the toughest-and smartest- private eyes in New York.

This time he's got himself involved in trying to keep alive the current heart-throb of Broadway-Pierre Dupray.

Dupray is so certain that he's going to be bumped off between cocktail time and the time he boards the night plane for Hollywood that he is paying Bowman 2,000 dollars to keep him breathing.

This is a tough, rough story with the inimitable Bowman on top of his form in one of the grimmest assignments of his career.

The girl in the black velvet gown looked to be very drunk - she also looked to be in plenty of trouble...

Bowman liked neither her type of escort not the way she was being manhandled into the sedan parked outside Morry's Bar. He like even less the smack on the jaw he got when he intervened.

This is the start of a new, high-pressure adventure with a tremendous climax. The Bowman Touch has all the streamlined pace and suspense to be expected from that master of the modern thriller - Hartley Howard.

Edwin Newsome was pretty worried about his brother's health - so worried that he hired Glenn Bowman to work his way into Harold Newsome's household to do some unofficial sleuthing.

Harold was suffering from an obscure sickness, and though he's recently married a pretty girl much younger than him, Edwin didn't think it was just blonde fever In fact, he suspects that the lovely Moira is taking a short-cut to wealthy widowhood by putting poison in her husband's food.

Bowman's first step forward brings him up against a corpse, and even he can't make a dead man talk.This is only...