Hate to do this to my old friend Dan J. Marlowe, but I have to give this one 1 1/2 stars. Bellman/Amateur Detective Johnny Killain is involved in a Maltese Falcon type plot in this one - with a motley cast of characters after a "monstrance" belonging to the Catholic church that was stolen in Florence in the closing days of WW II. I won't bother to describe the plot. It takes several pages at the end to describe who did what, and by that time you don't really care. Not badly written--Marlowe is too good for that--but it just goes here and there, with some good fight scenes, while Killain also gets to bed all the ladies plus his usual on-call pleasure box, the hotel switchboard operator. Killain's attitude toward women isn't quite so annoying as in other books in the series, probably because the women are worse than he is. ( )