Palm Beach Confidential

"Palm Beach is like Roman Polanski’s movie Chinatown. You think you know what’s going on, but, I guarantee, you don't."

Maxie Roberts, a Palm Beach gallery owner, discovers his wealthy socialite client been brutally murdered in the boudoir of her Palm Beach mansion and that the paintings he was hired to appraise are forgeries. When his murdered client’s teddy-boy husband, Count Sergio Ordenoff, is accused of his wife’s death another Palm Beach scandal erupts and Maxie finds himself drawn into a high profile murder that threatens not only his fortune but his life.

When Maxie’s gallery becomes an arson target of the forger he is forced to find the forger before he or members of his family become victims. Palm Beach is noted for its big money and big toes and Maxie is forced to stomp on more than his share as his search takes him into a surprising subterranean culture festering just below the refined patina of wealth and patronage.

Helped by Dickie Dirddle, a sexually-bipolar fellow art dealer and attorney Kathy Krammer, Maxie runs into high-end strippers, teddy-boy husbands and escort walkers, and uncovers a Palm Beach lady’s sex club where many wannabe socialites whose sole passion is getting their photographs in the Palm Beach Daily News society pages end up dead.

Maxie also discovers that many of the forgeries were switched for the original paintings decades ago. So why is the killer murdering his victims years later?

　

Palm Beach Confidential weaves a complex, twisted plot that plays out in a thrilling roller coaster climax. Mr Mykle has deftly slid Maxie Roberts as a hip and sightly subversive art dealer with a libido in overdrive into the Palm Beach sleuth niche vacated by Lawrence Sander’s private detective, Archy McNally Mr Mykle, who wrote the non-fiction book Killer ‘cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928, a historical vignette of the second deadliest natural disaster in American history, is obvious no stranger to the ritzy and wealthy domain of Palm Beach as well as its guarded secrets and back allies.