[John Easy 03] • The Same Lie Twice

A copywriter’s wife has vanished, and only John Easy is slick enough to save her

Jim Benning makes $25,000 a year writing drivel for the admen at the Arbogast Joseph Agency, and his wife thinks he’s worth a whole lot less. Joanna is a model: nervous, beautiful, and prone to meltdowns. In a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage, she agrees to a few sessions with a psychiatrist in San Ignacio—a quack whose psychobabble is more sinister than it appears. But when Joanna disappears, Jim’s only hope is John Easy, the hippest P.I. in Hollywood. Jim gives John a matchbook found in his wife’s purse for a club called Maybe—a swinger’s hideout where morality is not in style—and John plunges into the seedy side of sunny San Ignacio, where the copywriter’s wife led an entirely different sort of existence. To save Joanna from her shadow self, John Easy will have to swing harder than ever before.