Key West painter Augie Silver is dead.

Not a great artist maybe, but Augie's reputation (and value) were rising nicely since he gave up - painted-out - three years ago. And then freak weather and violent seas claimed this experienced sailor. His corpse is lost.

It's not long after the funeral before Augie's friends start taking more of an interest in their dead companion's increasing stock. There's the loser Jimmy Gibbs who wants to buy the charter boat he works. Ray Yates, minor local radio celebrity, in big with (Florida Straits) gangster Charlie Ponte. Clayton Phipps, the dead man's best buddy determined to take good care of Augie's widow. And Roberto Natchez, small-time poet suddenly rededicated to his chicken-strangling hot-blooded Latin roots. Not to mention the artist's agent Claire and her weak-willed, heavily-debted husband Kip. All boast paintings given them by their ever generous dead friend. Suddenly very expensive paintings.

But what would happen if, the big auction lined-up, a certain dead artist should show up one night, emaciated, battered, but still very much alive? And an artist anxious to begin working again.

There are more than a few shades of the monumental squabble over the Andy Warhol estate about all this. Shames plugs smartly into the whole atmosphere of vultures on a feeding frenzy: a body of work immediately translated into inflated, escalating prices, and also the way in which artistic fortunes - even dead ones - are blown by the whims of agents and critics, determined by forces very definitely not concerned with expertise.

Less sure, almost as though he's let the book get away from him towards the end, there is an unfortunate whiff of whodunit about the last few pages. He smartly resolves things, but it's never going to be as satisfactory as the duplicity, the despair he parades elsewhere. All of these people have to value the time they spent with Augie Silver, but in the end where is the dividing line between friendship and a simple solution to their collective troubles? And how far does it have to go before the need to ensure his death is the order of the day?

It's a fair bet that Willeford would have also found much to admire in Shame's writing. He turns a mean phrase: steaming puddles that "made your legs sweat like hot breath on your crotch"; a gangster's face that "bore all the small-brained ecstasy of an ape at the opera". If sometimes it feels as though he's had a great idea but not the will to follow through, then it can be disappointing. It might, for example, have been intriguing not to surround Augie with an entirely innocent wife and the ingenuous gay Cuban houseboy, Ruben. When the gangsters make a fleeting appearance the book really shines. A minor Warhol screenprint then rather than a monumental Mao, but a Warhol just the same.