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.