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The case was a loser. Just another Skid Row stiff washed-up dead with a needle in his arm. But Buck Bordell—Portland’s premier pain-in-the-ass detective—happens to be a sucker for lost causes. Only this time he’s forced to work alongside Frank Takahashi, some war hero turned PI, whose boy scout scruples and Japanese name are a terminal pair of liabilities in a cynical town where VJ Day has come and gone and done little to clear the wartime hysteria still lingering in the air.

Which is too damn bad, because Buck and Frank are stuck together. And once they start pulling the first threads of this supposed nothing of a case, their investigation quickly devolves into a tangle of underworld intrigue, trigger-happy cops, and a vast conspiracy to strip the Rose City of its thorns by any means necessary. Fists. Bullets. Acts of God. Nothing is off-limits as the danger mounts and the two detectives are forced to sink or swim if they mean to discover the truth of not only one man’s death, but of what justice means in a country ever defined by the depths of its hypocrisy.