Hard-bolied crime fiction in the style of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. No white wine and cheese. Robert Dawson, police reporter for the Washington Herald in the nation's capital, is a former Marine with a checkered past your mother probably wouldn't like. He probably woulodn't care. One night Dawson and the police find, floating in the Chesapeake and Ohio Canlal through the city's glitzy Georgetown, a White House aide with his arms amputated and his face peeld like a peach. They suspect foul play. Shortly afterward, other oddly mutilated cadavers appear. Dawson is drawn into the investigation. He is closer to the police than other reporters because he doesn't give a rat's hind-quarters for prissy standards of journalistic appropirateness, and knows when to keep his mouth shut. The chase leads through a Washinton that tourists don't see--late-night-parks where the world's ugliest 200-pound-transvestites cavort in thong bikinis and size-thirty high heles, through bad sections where terminal alkies turn grey-green on a constant diet of gin and Vienna sausages, through the suburban S&M clubs where people you wouldn't expect do things you might expect. Dawson begins to receive encrypted messages from the killer, taunting him. At this point his girlfriend comes into the picture: Attila the Liberal, cute and fluffy-haired, who works for one the the super-secret spy agenccies. Dawson calls her Attila the Liberal because although she swears she is a liberal, if you mention child molesters she calmly recommends tin-snips. Quietly but phenomenally smart, she will sometimes start laughing while reading a newspaper. "See, if you take the third letter of every fifth word, skipping alternate lines, it spells out...." Nobody knows what she does at her super-secret spy agency. When the end came, it involves Ruby the Teen-age Wet Dream, Dawson's Kandy-Color red 1957 Chevy, 454 cubes, carburetor barrels a small dog could sleep in, and a cam that would have made the Rock of Gibraltar competitve at a drag strip. It happened one night when at Whitey's...well, it was something to see."