Between engagements, actors wait tables, clerk in department stores, sell encyclopedias, even teach school. But screen actor Saxon is unique: he moon-lights as a private eye. Or maybe it's the other way around...

So when hotshot producer Mark Evering summons Saxon to his house (where a high-drug/blatant-sex party is going on) and asks him to find his wayward young daughter, it's the hint of a possibility of a part in Evering's next picture that hooks Saxon, rather than the $10,000 fee.

Not that Saxon is all that happy about his assignment. Evering's whole setup is sordid: the producer can't understand what made his daughter run off with a shady lawyer twice her age when her father has "given her everything" - including a Betty Ford detox for her high school graduation.

Trailing the pair, Saxon finds the mutilated body of the lawyer - a shyster in Van Nuys, California, with a reputation for kinky sex - in a Tijuana hotel room.

His search for Merissa Evering leads him into encounters with a leading matador, a beautiful woman married to a brutish and powerful landowner (and chafing at her vows), and a colorful and dangerous assortment of Tijuana lowlife, with a few imports from north of the border thrown in.