All Robby Vaughan wants is to play his pedal steel guitar in honky tonk bars, live the quiet life with his two cats, Buddy and J.D., and rambunctious dog, Rufus, and to fall in love with a gorgeous women at the rate of one or two a week. When his millionaire aunt Margaret Waddley-Wordstone summons him to her West Hartford mansion with a job offer, he can't refuse, although coming from the wrong side of the family tracks, he knows it would probably be best if he did. What follows is a raucous case of misdirection, misdemeanor, missing persons, and mystery. Soon, everyone from his two distant (but not quite distant enough) cousins, Lillian the Vaudevillian, and the loosely wrapped Lita, to the land-grabbing robber baroness Venus Edwards, who seems to have a hand in every nefarious business deal in Hartford County, is telling Robby only what they want him to hear and insisting, with varying degrees of success, that he play the knight in shining armor in their fantasy worlds of lies and deception. He thinks: "These people all want me to find their lost cat, but when I ask them what color it is, they say, 'What cat?'" With a seat-of-the-pants methodology that might make the great noir detectives of history spin like augers in their graves, Robby tenaciously chases around Hartford in skeptical pursuit of the truth -- or at least the facts, since nobody he talks to seems to have the capacity to tell the truth.