18-year-old Chicagoan Ed Hunter doesn't want to end up like his father, a drunk married to a shrewish wife. Then his father is killed, mugged in a dark alley. Ed looks up his uncle Ambrose, former detective and carny, and together they investigate the events leading up to what looks increasingly like murder. Ed learns, in the process, how his father ended up the way he did. For its realism and portrayal of character, the novel won an Edgar for Best First Mystery Novel (American). It was followed by six more Ed and Am Hunter novels, as well as short stories. As of 2003, the novel is available in e-text, and also in an omnibus volume titled Hunter and Hunted, with The Dead Ringer, The Bloody Moonlight, and Compliments of a Fiend.