A big businessman from Chicago is vacationing at a resort on Big Wolf Lake. He throws a big bash on his boat, inviting all the neighbors. He gets extremely drunk. One of the men--like all the others--figures he doesn’t belong, so he poisons him. However, he falls overboard. One woman finally comes forward to "clear her conscience," admitting that she saw the poison being slipped into his drink. She convinces everyone that it was really murder. The guilty man is taken to trial. Although no one wants to see him convicted, since he is a "local yokel" and the victim was an "intruder," the evidence seems conclusive. Just as the verdict is about to be read, the coroner comes rushing in to verify that he drowned before the poison got a chance to work and he is acquitted.

LIGHTS OUT

The daughter of an electrician from Big Bay, Mn. Is kidnapped. The family is new in town. They moved there to escape the dangers of big city life in Minneapolis. There seem to be no clues until Ralph, the old timer who did all the electrical work for years, notices that there seems to be an unusually large number of letters which turn up missing on the local neon signs. He calls Max Stryker in on the case and together, with Rick’s help on the computer, the missing letters when fed into it and figure out the message the letters spell out. They follow the clues, which lead them to the girl, who is found bound and gagged in an old deserted motel. Also there is a corpse of a man no one seems to be able to identify. The majority of the local residents believe that the victim’s father plotted the whole thing to get the ransom money, which he tries to get the town to help him raise, but Max is sure he truly loves his daughter and could never do anything so terrible. When he goes to trial, he is found guilty and sent to jail. As he is put into the sheriff’s car to be transported to Duluth, Max’s cat, Muffin, appears with the only piece of incriminating evidence that can clear the condemned: the written notes that reveal the whole plan in the very distinctive handwriting of the kidnapped victim’s real father, who had recently learned of his daughter’s existence.

SLAY BELLES

Max Stryker decides to take a creative writing course at a small private college in Duluth, MN after a sorority house reports that their delivery boy from the pizza house has mysteriously disappeared.

One by one, more of the delivery boys continue to vanish. Rick Brown, Max’s sidekick, tries to convince her not to go there, but she is not to be dissuaded. In an effort to protect Max, Rick gets a job at the pizza house.

Missing persons reports are filed on each of them, finally bringing in the FBI agents who helped (?) solve the case in Max Stryker’s first escapade (BANK ROLL). To Max’s dismay, they are no better than they were several years ago when she first met them. Nor, they agree, is she any less arrogant and arbitrary than she was then.

Max is faced with a difficult decision when her father, who has a history of heart trouble, is once again in the hospital. It looks like this time is the end for dear old Bud, so the local people from Willow Creek hold a special election for chief of police and Max is the obvious choice. She has one week until she must return to Willow Creek to assume her duties there. She has to find out who has done away with the missing delivery boys, which now includes Rick Brown.

With time running out, she joins the sorority just in time to figure out who the real belle of the ball is.

MEET MARKET

Jenny Aspholm has come back to Willow Creek for the summer. A classmate of Max Stryker, she is the perfect example of the girl you love to hate. Voted most likely to succeed, most popular and most photogenic in their senior year, she is now a med student at the University of Miami, and she lets everyone know she has big plans for the future.

Jenny had worked in the meat department at the local Jack & Jill Grocery Store during high school, where all the other butchers were men. She almost didn’t get the job, but she convinced the owner that it was good practice for her career, as she would be cutting up human meat in the operating room after she finished her college.

Now, back on the scene, she arranges to meet the men from the meat department on a regular basis. Max and Rick Brown, her cohort, sense that there is something fishy in the meat department, but they aren’t sure what it is until head butcher Ralph Samson is found hanging in the walk-in freezer.

Max and Rick get busy on the investigation, against her father’s advice, convinced that Jenny is the guilty party. But, surprises are in store—or in the store—on every side.

MINE SHAFT

When the Jessie Mine is reopened on the Mesabi Iron Range, a decayed body is found. Who is the victim? Why is he there? Was it an accident? Max Stryker and Rick are asked to find the truth. When it appears obvious that there was foul play involved, they have to find out who did it. Once the body is identified, the questions arise. Why didn’t anyone report him missing? Who really knew the loner who lay dead for over five years in the deserted mine? When the county officials think they have found the murderer, a couple of young kids who were seen going in and out of the mine on a regular basis, Max and Rick have to prove that they didn’t have any part in it. In fact, they claim they didn’t even know the body was there. The only way to clear them is to find out who really did it. Just when it looks hopeless they find a letter to the victim, identifying him as the brother of the mine’s owner. He was there to claim his part of the mine, which was left to him by their father. It looks like, in the end, both brothers "got the shaft."

SHOPPING MAUL

Max Stryker and her cohort, Rick, attend a crime prevention conference in Minneapolis at the Mall of America. There they meet Patrick O’Malley and Grace Johnson, two retired sleuths from New York City. They strike up a friendship immediately. When one of the crime reporters that Max used to work with in Minneapolis doesn’t show up for the session he was really looking forward to, Max suspects foul play even though no one else is convinced, since he was "never reliable anyway." Max, Rick, Patrick and Grace team up to find him, and when they do he is in one of the amusement rides, tightly strapped into his seat. He appears to have been clawed by a cat. The petshop owner is obviously the one who did this, but why? He swears he didn’t, and for some reason the foursome believe him. He is a seedy, unkempt overaged hippy, and the perfect suspect. When they learn that he has some hidden secrets in his past, they wonder if they are on the right track, but continue to prove it--one way or the other. It is almost the end of the trial and all the evidence points to the petshop hippy’s guilt when a deaf girl who saw the whole thing comes in with her mother to tell them who really did it. The head of the convention, hoping to attract some "big time press coverage," staged the whole thing. He thought if he gave him a strong sedative and someone discovered the body, it would be good publicity as they had over 500 private eyes there to try to solve the "murder," which was nothing more than an April Fool’s joke. He intended for it to be a stunt, and the victim had agreed to play along with him--for $10,000. The only thing he hadn’t counted on was the runaway baby tiger from the petstore getting loose and finishing the job he never intended to complete. Can you really try a tiger for murder? How do you lock up an already caged animal?