Set in San Francisco and environs during the Civil War, it introduces Fergus O'Hara, the most roguish new detective in years, and his equally-engaging wife Hattie. Their first case is a complicated and wacky one. Among other people, places and things, it involves a corpulent financial speculator named Horace T. Goatleg, an insane parrot, a one-eyed man addicted to hoarhound drops, a suave gambler addicted to women, a boisterous Irish militia company known as the Mulrooney Guards, the San Francisco Volunteer Fire Department, a keg of beer, a careless footpad, the crew of the riverboat Freebooty, the Freebooty herself, two murders, a gold robbery, several assorted chases, what may literally be termed a bang-up finale on St. Patrick's Day morning, and, for good measure, a couple of bonus surprises.
About the Author: Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men's action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging. He's also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller. Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre's Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls "alternative classics"), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he's the co-author (with Marcia Muller) of 1001 Midnights. The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he's published in almost thirty countries. He was the very first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he's received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His passion for the old crime pulps is largely responsible for keeping them in the public's eye. He's amassed a huge collection of books and magazines and has always been an omnivorous reader; all of which made him a natural when it came to editing various anthologies. He admits "it was a pleasure tracking down good stories to fit a particular anthology theme." But after editing 80 or so of them over a period of twenty-some years, he decided it was "more than enough."