Bodies Are Where You Find Them

Bodies Are Where You Find Them is a crime novel by the American writer Brett Halliday, published in 1941 by Henry Holt and Company. It belongs to the long series of detective novels about Michael Shayne.

Burt Stallings is a tall man in his fifties with the manner of someone who has had money for a long time, and he wants the missing daughter of the house found. Mike Shayne takes the case and immediately finds himself in the position every private detective dreads, because he has already come across the young woman: she was strangled, and her body had been left where it could be found. The best-known version of the story has Shayne sweating in a way he never has before, with a client who expects an answer and a corpse that has made the ordinary version of that answer impossible.

The novel is a hardboiled Miami mystery of its period, and it works the ground Halliday returned to throughout the series: a rich family's private trouble, a detective who has to keep moving while everybody else wants him to stop, and a city full of people who can be paid to look the other way.