There’s a hippie on the highway- James Hadley Chase

Harry Mitchell, after serving his three years in Vietnam, visits Paradise City for a vacation before taking up a job in New York.

En route to Paradise City, Harry saves Randy (also a traveler) from a bunch of hippies. Randy feels greatful and promises to get Harry a job as a life guard in a sea side restaurant. While travelling together, they fall into a trap where they’re planted with a corpse of an old guy. But Harry and Randy find a safe place and ingeniously dispose the body. They reach their destinations and life seems normal for a few days. But soon, Paradise City Police Force suspect something’s wrong and start digging.

In the end, when the adventure is over, Harry is overwhelmed by the amount of violence he’s faced and wonders how his future would turn out to be.

A Can Of Worms –James Hadley Chase

In this book, the protagonist, Bart Anderson is a creep, a reckless spender and an operator in ‘The Parnell Detective Agency’ in Paradise City. His problem is that he has a money sucking girlfriend and he can never get enough money to spend on her, which leaves him always borrowing from friends.

And that’s when the agency lands him with the job of tailing the rich author, Russ Hamel’s wife to check if she’s having an illicit affair. But he finds out that there’s something more than just an affair, or worse, a terrorist link up. But Bart is so stuck up and his girlfriend keeps badgering him to make more money that he turns blackmailer.

What happens later is what the story is all about. But finally, the author makes you see that blackmailing does no good.