In the City, it's always two-thirty in the morning and raining. Edward G. Robinson is strangling Joan Bennett on a fire escape, James Cagney is bleeding to death in a gutter, Humphrey Bogart is walking the mean streets and the Night Mayor has the power to assume any identity he chooses

The City is the dream refuge of Truro Daine, alias the Night Mayor, the twenty-first century's Napoleon of crime. the Gunmint can't let Daine escape, even if it's only into his own imaginings, and so Dreamer Tom Tunney, alias Dick Quick, private investigator, is sent to haul the master criminal out. When the Night Mayor's City swallows Tuney whole, reinforcements arrive in the shape of Susan Bishopric, a Dreamer of genius with one more due to pay.

Against the film noir landscape Daine has created, Tunney and Susan must pin the Night Mayor down before his dreams of re-entering their world become deadly reality.