This is a classic Nero Wolfe/Archie goodwin book of three
short stories. In the first story, "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo," a potential
client is strangled with Nero wolfe's own soup-stained tie, while waiting in his office, as Mr. Wolfe and Archie argue upstairs about whether the great detective should take the case at all. But once it had been done, Nero Wolfe was determined to find the truth -- and his pride was involved in no small way. In "Death of a Demon," the second short story of the trilogy, a public realtions specialist is found dead in an alley with a bullet through him, to the shock and amazement of his wife, who has come to see Nero wolfe to give him a gun so that she would not succumb to the unconscious urge to
kill her husband. She'd have to line up behind a long line of others to have done so, however, as sadistic psychopath is one of the kinder things that he could be, and was, called. In the third story, "
Counterfeit for Murder," an elderlylady who ran a boardinghouse for actors and would-be actors showed up on wolfe's doorstep with a packet of (counterfeit) cash she's found hidden in her parlour. After an attempt on her life and the murder of one of her tenants, the battle between Cramer of the New York Police Department Homicide Division and the Feds is on. It's a very funny story.