Philip Marlowe"s on a case: his client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband"s collection. That"s the simple part. It becomes more complicated when Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. That"s also unlucky for a private investigator, because leaving a trail of corpses around LA gets cops" noses out of joint. If Marlowe doesn"t wrap this one up fast, he"s going to end up in jail or worse, in a box in the ground.