Tony Rome

In return for a fee, Miami Beach private eye Tony Rome helps remove drunken, unconscious Diana Pines from a room in the motel operated by his former partner, Ralph Turpin. Tony takes Diana to her family's mansion, and the girl's millionaire father, construction magnate Rudolph Kosterman, hires him to find out what is troubling his recently married daughter; meanwhile, Diana's stepmother, Rita, offers Tony a fee if he will inform her first of his discoveries.
After learning that Diana has lost a diamond pin, Tony is chloroformed and beaten by two thugs and nearly strangled by the girl's imbecilic stepuncle; later, he discovers that Turpin has been shot to death in his office. Assisted in his sleuthing by predatory divorcée Ann Archer, the detective learns that Diana has been giving large sums of money to her alcoholic mother, Lorna, and that Rita's valuable jewelry has been replaced with paste imitations. In pursuit of evidence, Tony has a series of conflicts with a stripteaser and her lesbian lover, a drug addict and her homosexual contact, the two murderers of the jeweler who was making the paste imitations for Rita, and with his old friend Lieutenant Santini of the Miami police, who wants information that Tony possesses. After an attempt is made on Kosterman's life, Tony learns that Turpin was murdered by Rita's ex-husband, Nimmo, who has been blackmailing her because their divorce was never legalized. Nimmo eventually dies from wounds inflicted by Turpin, and the case is finally solved when Lorna's second husband, Adam Boyd, a doctor who lost his license for performing abortions, confesses that he tried to kill Kosterman so that Diana could inherit the family fortune. After Santini arrests the doctor, Tony decides to take a vacation with Ann, but she chooses to return to a safer life with her former husband.