When a suspicious helicopter crash sends millionaire P. Vansittart to the bottom of Lake Tahoe, International Surety's ace claims adjuster Hobart Lindsey is on the case. His job: find the girl in Vansittart's policy, "the woman on the cover of Death in the Ditch" - a hardboiled novel of the early fifties. But did this beautiful model ever exist? Or was she just the creation of another long-forgotten pulp artist's lurid imagination? In this, the fifth novel in the series that began with The Comic Book Killer, Lindsey and his girlfriend, Berkeley detective Marvia Plum, are sent headfirst into the dusty world of vintage paperbacks on a search that turns up an old nemesis, an old love triangle, and the sinister side of America's Golden Age.