Mike Hammer befriends a hooker being assaulted by a john, and admires a gorgeous ring she's wearing. She ends up dead (nearly every woman in this movie does, a darn shame, since they're uniformly gorgeous) and Hammer, grumpy and angry, sets out to find the guy what did it. His quest leads him down a strange path: it seams the ring was part of a treasure trove of jewels hidden by the Nazis, and they're worth a cool million, and the guys after the stash would kill a lot of people for a million bucks. Low-budget but effective! I liked this independent film released by United Artists mainly for the main cast: Robert Bray, an actor with whom I was unfamiliar, is a very good Mike Hammer, Pamela Duncan (whom I knew well from Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Undead) makes a VERY sexy Velda, and - best of all - Whitney Blake as the astoundingly lovely blonde who holds the key to the mystery. There's a lot of action and of course some great Spillane dialog. Great Spillane Dialog: Hammer, doing some routine questioning: 'It ain't easy to talk when you're choked on your own teeth.' Rumination on life: 'I like matches, you never have to refill them and when you're through, you simply throw them away, like people.' A surprisingly good out-of-nowhere picture with a nice DVD presentation.