Margaret O'Mara is desperate to find her missing brother, Joe Colleran. She doesn't have a clue or a dime, and she hasn't seen her brother in thirty years. The last she heard, he was running a bar in Florida with an old war buddy, Michael Minogue. But when Minogue is discovered murdered on a Chicago pier, Margaret asks private eye Paul Whelan to solve the puzzle of her brother's disappearance. As Whelan makes his rounds to the dilapidated apartment buildings and smoky bars of Chicago, he discovers that the case of Joe Colleran might not be hopeless after all. Before his death, Minogue often talked of his old gang of close friends, which mysteriously broke apart after World War II. Their stories take Whelan through the abandoned ruins of the landmark Riverview Park, once Chicago's famous amusement park and the site of a forty-year-old unsolved murder. This crime comes back to haunt a diverse group of men and women, formerly youthful friends or lovers, who still conceal the secret that binds them all.