Marty Wiessman left school a no-hoper with no qualifications. He lucks out when an old school chum offers him a job in his successful private detective agency. But his life starts to disintegrate when he discovers his partner in the office, murdered. The police insist that he killed himself, but Marty knows differently. He laboriously unearths clues to his partner's murderer but struggles to make sense of them. His concentration is not helped when a very attractive woman walks into his office and asks him to find her missing brother. Before long, Marty and his client are conducting a torrid affair. Marty oscillates between believing that these two cases are linked and that they are unrelated. Soon, more dead bodies turn up and Marty fears he and his client have become Mafia targets. The plot twists and turns always one step ahead of Marty, who is always slow on the uptake and who is just as surprised as anyone when the truth is finally revealed.