Glory Doyle had been one of the broken birds. McGee had taken her aboard The Busted Flush, patched her up, and turned her loose to make another try at life. Now she was calling for help again. Someone had very quietly, very skilfully, extracted six hundred thousand dollars from her husband during the last painful year of his life.

Blackmail? Obviously. But the how and the why of it baffled McGee until he began to detect the lingering, unpleasant odor of sadism; until he began to turn up the nasty little bits of evidence left by someone who preferred to maim rather than kill, someone who liked to watch and savor the agony of his victim...