It takes fear to make normal people reach out to a private detective, and that's how Dan Fortune knows his newest client, the icy Mia Morgan, isn't normal. For reasons she refuses to reveal, she offers to pay him far too much to investigate a lush blonde who frequents a nearby French restaurant. Dan's love life is in turmoil, and he needs a distraction. In the end, he takes the job. Soon events turn bizarre. A wizened old man warns him to run, a vicious Israeli pilot threatens to remove Dan's one good arm if he doesn't steer clear of Mia Morgan, and a patron at the blonde's favorite restaurant seems to know more about her than he lets on. Finding the blonde is easy, but probing her love life leads Dan into a no-man's-land of violence where he's hunted both by the law and the mafia. Gradually he fits together a jigsaw of passion, treachery, and greed that gives him a shocking picture of who the guilty are and what drove them to destroy their enemies. New York Times: "One of the year's Best Mysteries." "He combines superb characters and excellent plotting to produce an exciting mystery." - Booklist "He carries on the Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald tradition with skill and finesse." - Washington Post "He is a novelist as well as a writer of whodunits, with real insight into his characters and the ability to construct logical, coherent plots. His prose is lean and unpretentious, without the flights of self-pitying fancy that sometimes mar books even as well-written as the Ross Macdonald mysteries." - New York Times