At the corner of Hollywood and Vine, the news walked straight through the doors of Gentry's Coffee Shop and sat down at Whistler's table. The facts: a boy named Kenny Gotch, a.k.a. Harriet LaRue, was dead, leaving behind a clue to a murder Whistler would rather forget. Whistler once worked alongside police detective Isaac Canaan, searching for whoever stole and mutilated Canaan's little niece and left her body draped over a tombstone in Hollywood Cemetery. Now Whistler sees a chance to solve the crime that still plagues Canaan's soul.

Few know more about Kenny than that he favored purple dresses and rhinestone shoes. His phone was on auto-dial to a boy called Pooch, a professor who looks like Howdy-Doody, and a child-snatching Satanist, but not to Mary Bucket, the pretty nurse who was there when Kenny died...and who has what it takes to put Whistler under her spell. Yet once Canaan himself starts following Kenny's trail of dangerous connections, nothing can keep Whistler from shadowing his progress through a nether world of glittering lies and faded promise, where the only thing that can't be bought is hype.