The first title in the New Orleans-based Pat Gallegher series by three-time Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award nominee, and two-time Short Mystery Fiction Society Derringer Award winner Richard Helms. Gallegher, a failed seminarian, retired forensic psychologist, disgraced college professor, and now a jazz cornetist in a dive bar located off Toulouse Street in New Orleans" French Quarter, sidelines as a collector for loanshark Leduc to pay off his own sizable gambling debt. To balance the shaky scales of his own brittle karma, he also performs "favors" for friends, and friends of friends. One of these friends, lawyer Cully Tucker, brings a distraught woman to visit Gallegher. She tells a sordid tale of an illicit affair with a woman-chaser named Sammy Cain. Now, Cain has disappeared, and the woman fears that he has been murdered - by her husband!