Trouble in Triplicate tells a trio of tales in which the murder victim comes to Wolfe before being killed. In "Before I Die" a crime boss brings a blackmail case to Wolfe, never expecting to die. But just in case, he makes Wolfe the executor of his estate, thereby making Wolfe and Archie Goodwin the prime suspects in his murder. Wolfe's task: solve the crime boss's murder before he and Archie are erased by the boss's vengeful hit man. In "Help Wanted--Male" Wolfe blows off a prospective client who has received a death threat mere hours before the man's brutal murder.
When reporter/crime writer Russell Monroe finds his former lover brutally slain in an apparently ritual style, he suspects a connection to other recent murders in the county. Somehow, the case never appears on the police blotter - although Russell saw his former colleague, homicide chief Marty Parish, leaving the scene of the crime - and soon all evidence of the death disappears. Meanwhile, a string of killings continues in the same gruesome style, and Russell becomes the contact of the deranged man responsible.
When a high-society party is crashed by a naked, knife-wielding, blood-covered man who "thinks" he might have killed someone, Eve Dallas must track down the crime, and the criminals. Everything points to Satanic ritual, but Eve doesn't believe in devil worship...
When a maid at the Roarke Palace Hotel is murdered by a hitman for the elite, Lieutenant Eve Dallas suspects that someone who wants her husband dead may be connected to the crime.
For Spenser, that most unorthodox of private detectives, no case is ever straightforward and the theft of a 14th-century illuminated manuscript proves no exception. His investigation soon leads him into organized crime, dope-pushing, theft, radical politics, adultery and murder.
