From the inside front cover: “Private Eye Sader had very little to go on. All he knew was what he could learn from his tight-lipped client, Hale Gibbings, a prominent California architect. Five years before Gibbings had managed to conceal the fact that his daughter had an illegitimate child. He had found a couple who would adopt the baby without fanfare – or too many questions. Recently, Gibbings had received an anonymous, typewritten letter stating that the foster parents were dead and the child was being mistreated. Sader’s assignment: find the child.

And before long, Sader would ask himself how a private eye was supposed to solve anything when everyone involved, including his hard-boiled client, was a professional liar – and when the only person who could be persuaded to tell the truth was silenced by murder?