Toby Peters is a private detective with sore feet, a bad back, and a tendency to bruise easily. He lives on a strict diet of hot dogs, tacos, shredded wheat, and disaster, and spends most of his time at the wrong end of a gun. Peters can't get through the day without finding a corpse or losing his shoes or both, but he has a reputation for keeping his mouth shut...so when a nervous young billionaire finds a spy at his dinner party, he wants Peters on the job.

It's 1941 and that young billionaire is Howard Hughes, a man with his fair share of enemies—and they're about to become Peters' enemies as well. With a boatload of unsavory characters on his trail, Peters gets himself into an assortment of unlikely situations, and it takes Basil Rathborne to extricate him—lending a hand with a flourish that would have pleased Sherlock Holmes himself.