John Ball: The Cool Cottontail (USA 1967)

From the Publisher:
Coming on strong again - Virgil Tibbs, negro detective, tangles with nudists, naked murder, and cunningly clothed guilt. "First Rate..." Anthony Boucher, The New York Times

THE NAKED CORPSE was floating in the swimming pool. The boy who found him was naked, too, as were the boy's mother, father, and curvacious sister. This was a nudist park and they were all nudists. Then detective Virgil Tibbs was called in. He was clothed but he was cool. It wasn't his clothes they noticed, though. It was his skin. It happened to be black as black as the terror enveloping them. And Virgil Tibbs plunged into his most delicate and dangerous case....

"A detective who will join the 'great detective' category... You'll like Virgil Tibbs." -- Boston Herald

John Ball: The Cool Cottontail. New York: Bantam Books, 1967, Bantam Books F3487, 149 p., ¢50.

John Ball: The Cool Cottontail (USA 1966)

From the Publisher:
Virgil Tibbs, of the Pasadena, California, police force, first appeared in In the Heat of the Night, which won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar for Best First Mystery of the Year.

Sun Valley Lodge, run by Forrest Nunn and his wife Emily, with the assistance of their three children -- Linda, a most attractive teenager, her twenty-four-year-old brother George, and small Carole -- was in a nudist park, which had an excellent reputation (except with a few people) and a most careful screening of members, so that sudden and murderous death had certainly never intruded upon it before.

Though the body floating in the pool was nude, it was not the body of one of the members. The dead man was well-to-do, perhaps even prominent. But not only was he nude; his clothing was nowhere to be found; and someone had tried to prevent his being identified. And, oddly enough, no one came forward to identify him, or to report that a man like the dead man was missing.

It was going to be a hard murder to solve. But Virgil Tibbs, moving expertly and patiently, was determined to solve it -- and even to get used to carrying on his investigations in the midst of a nudist park, which added certain problems of its own.

Tibbs is a detective who won friends and admirers immediately -- and will go on to win more. (To see how much readers liked him in his first appearance turn to the back of the jacket.)

John Ball: The Cool Cottontail. A Harper Novel of Suspense. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, 208 p., $4.50.