P.I. Frank Johnson takes up the missing-person case of Knox Yowell, a machinist who operates a metal lathe in a job shop. One August morning, Knox leaves for the corner bodega to buy his cigarettes and never returns home. His distraught wife, Madge Yowell, discovers Frank’s business card in Knox’s nightstand drawer. However, Frank has no memory of having met or spoken to Knox. The Yowells live in Hingham, a blue-collar suburb 12 miles south of Boston, and Frank has never traveled from his small town of Pelham, Virginia, up north to Boston. Of course, nothing is as it appears on the surface in Frank’s murky, noirish crime world. As Frank probes deeper into Knox Yowell’s disappearance, he leans on his long-time friend and business partner, Gerald Peyton; his medical examiner wife, Dreema; and his brilliant but outspoken attorney, Robert Gatlin. The investigation soon compels Frank to reckon with the tragedy of his boyhood, when his parents died in a car accident caused by a drunken motorist. Violence and mayhem rack Frank as he struggles to set things right.