Shortly after moving into a new house, a young woman named Ashley Robbins is found murdered. Suspicion immediately falls upon the woman's ex-con boyfriend, George Reid. Assigning the case to the dismal alcoholic Detective Cotton, he learns the victim had just inherited the house in the will of a recently deceased married man whom she and her boyfriend had been blackmailing. When Cotton is murdered in the course of the investigation, it falls to the bull-headed investigator Curtis Lake and his wild partner Moppa to follow the dangerous threads which include the additional murder of an inexperienced detective who it turns out is also an heir to the man's estate. When the deceased man's widow is murdered, it's obvious that a systematic plot is in place to murder every benefactor of the dead man's will (and every suspect). Baffled by this pattern of people marked for death, Curtis Lake searches for a killer with a motive unlike any he's ever come up against, and one who doesn't seem to exist.