A weekend fling turns into a week-long manhunt as the Nameless Detective's last solo case involves him in a cat and mouse chase through San Francisco's Japantown that ends in a confusion of murder, rape, and suicide.

It is Friday, and on Monday, Nameless will grudgingly welcome Eberhardt, a retired cop and old friend, into his detective agency. The weekend should give him just enough time to wrap up the little mystery of Haruko Gage's secret admirer who sends her expensive jewels, but doesn't sign his name. With Gage, a domineering designer, as a client, Nameless figures a little light work will bring him a little extra cash. But instead of uncovering a mopey lover, Nameless stumbles on a violent ritual murder and finds himself enmeshed in a bizarre case of confused identity and perverse kidnapping whose roots stem from the Tule Lake Relocation Center-one of the World War II camps for Japanese-Americans-and a long buried secret that would never have happened if a different crime against 100,000 people hadn't been committed in 1942.

While Eberhardt is pressing Nameless to set up shop, a kingpin in the Yakuza-the "Japanese Mafia"-is brutally butchered in his bathhouse, a rancher is killed in a hit- and-run accident, and a masoleum is burglarized and filled with fresh-cut roses.

The best clue Nameless has is a grainy black-and-white photo of three young Japanese men standing in front of a wire-mesh fence. To unmask the killer, Nameless must unravel a web of guilt and intrigue that spans many lives and forty years.
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.