Frank Malory (one "L" like the English author of chivalric romances), a top detective in post-war San Francisco, now, in the seventies, finds himself fallen on hard times. Depressed by the loss of his wife and the death of a client, he wonders if his time has passed him by. "Like the single apple that wouldn't fall from the tree, I hang rotting in winter," he tells himself. But maybe the world still needs an old-fashioned guy like Frank. "There's no more damsels and for sure no more knights," she told him. "Maybe except for you." When a mousy-looking woman in a frumpy dress came tapping at the pebbled glass of his office door, Frank thought he had found a simple and quick case that would keep him fortified with cheap rye on his spiral of self-destruction. He couldn't have been more wrong, and he was in for the case of his lifetime.