Kinsey is hired to deliver $25,000 to a fifteen-year-old kid but discovers that the person who hired her is a phony who shows up dead when she tries to collect her fee.

Fans have been fed short rations when it comes to Kinsey Milhone's past. But husband number one, vice-cop Mickey Magruder, remained a mystery -- until now. "A novel of depth and substance that is, in every way, the class of the series." (Booklist)

PI Kinsey Millhone is hired by three brothers to find a fourth who, it appears from their father's will, was not disinherited after all when he walked out on the family, and is entitled to $5 million. Kinsey finds him working as a janitor in a church, but no sooner found, than he is killed. Kinsey has more work.

"Beverly Danziger looked like an expensive, carefully wrapped package from a good but conservative shop. Only her compulsive chatter hinted at a nervousness out of all proportion to the problem she placed before Kinsey Millhone. There was an absent sister. A will to be settled -- a matter of a few thousand dollars. Mrs. Danziger didn't look as if she needed the money. And she didn't seem to be longing for a family reunion. Still, there were bills...

It started with the murder of Kinsey Millhone's sometime drinking buddy, an insurance claims adjuster. But before long Kinsey stumbles onto a massive insurance scam. Going undercover as a wisecracking vamp, Millhone descends into the Los Angeles nether world of machismo and gang hideouts. Her companion, terrified at having crossed the violent crook Raymond Maldonado, is Bibianna Diaz--no Girl Scout herself.

It was two days after Christmas when Kinsey Millhone received the bank slip showing a credit for five thousand dollars. The account number was correct but Kinsey hadn't made the deposit. Then came the phone call and suddenly everything became clear. The frame-up was working and Kinsey was trapped.

"He was young - maybe twenty or so - and he must once have been a good-looking kid. But now his body was covered in scars, his face half-collapsed. For three weeks Kinsey Millhone had watched him doggedly working out at the local gym. Then one day Bobby Callahan approached her with his story: a murderous assault on a rural road, a 400-foot plunge into the canyon below, his Porsche a ruin, his best friend dead. Even with huge chunks of his memory wiped...