When Depression-era private eye Maggie Sullivan is invited to dine with a millionaire, she doesn't expect the first course to be a gun in her face. It draws her into a gold-plated web of theft, revenge, double crosses and murder. A big-time swindle has made fools of some of the city's wealthiest businessmen. The man behind it has vanished. When Maggie begins asking questions, he reappears - dead in the river. But she's already learned too much. Someone's out to silence her too. Armed with her .38 and a nip of gin, Maggie closes in on a killer as a mobster offers a hint, a cop unsettles her with his chemistry, and a woman with deadly potential plays a game by her own rules.

Depression-era private investigator Maggie Sullivan risks losing her P.I. license - and her life - when two spinsters hire her to learn the fate of their father, who vanished twenty-six years earlier. She's barely started when her main suspect commits suicide and Maggie is summoned before the powerful chief of police. A stroke of his pen will revoke her license, and he warns her he's getting complaints about her from City Hall. With her livelihood on the line, fortified by a nip of gin and her .38, the intrepid detective follows a trail all but obliterated by time and the catastrophic Dayton flood of 1913 in which the vanished man went missing. It leads her to a local politician with bigger ambitions - and possibly secrets to hide. It takes her into dime stores, cheap hotels, and a violent ambush by men wearing brass knuckles. As a cop wages a wily campaign to win her affections, and a rag-tag newsboy pushes to become her assistant, crimes of the past explode in the present. Maggie fights to survive foes who must destroy her to destroy each other. Fans of strong women sleuths and historical atmosphere have dubbed this tough little private investigator "Sam Spade in a skirt."

Private eye Maggie Sullivan knows the streets of Depression-era Dayton, Ohio, as well as she knows an emery board. With a gin bottle in her desk, a .38 under her seat, and a great pair of legs she can hold her own against the toughest opponent. Then a routine case makes her a murder suspect and the target of a crime boss who's got friends at City Hall. Moving through a landscape where people line up at soup kitchens, Maggie draws information from sources others overlook: The waitress at the dime store lunch counter where she has breakfast; a corner newsboy; a nightclub cigarette girl in the rooming house where she lives. She shifts to a war of wits when she wants something from her shutterbug pal on the evening paper or the new cop teamed with her late father's partner. Before Maggie finds all the answers she needs, she's drugged and left in a ditch, has tea in the kitchen of a local cathouse and gambles her own life to save two others.