Amos Walker, old-school private eye, is hunting for a man who used to write steamy crime fiction - and now may have gotten burned by his own words. The paperback novel Walker carried in his pocket was fifty years old and from its tawdry cover to its fiery prose - still red hot.

A fictionalized tale of a real-life Detroit race riot in 1943, Paradise Valley was written by a man named Eugene Booth. With a New York publisher dying to reprint Booth's pulp fiction classic, Booth's disappearance didn't make any sense. At least not yet.

While hunting down Booth, Walker finds this peaceful missing-person case developing into something much more deadly. For a notorious New York mob hit man, one in protective custody and promoting his own bestselling, tell-all book, is also trailing Booth, and a half-century-old murder is coming back to light.

Between that killing and the story told in Booth's Paradise Valley, Walker is sure Booth has good reasons to want to disappear, and some people have good reasons to see him dead. For Walker, it's a question of separating fiction from fact, and keeping the key players alive long enough to know the truth. And that includes himself.