Shaken after a hair's-breadth escape from death, Nameless has made changes in his professional life, but he's not put himself out to pasture. Again he enters San Francisco's shadowy underworld, this time in a search for the identity of a gentle, mentally disturbed homeless man who has been found dead in an alley doorway. Clues are few, but Pronzini, working at the top of his form, takes his seasoned private-eye hero to a new phase of a still-evolving thirty-year career.

Bill Pronzini has published sixty novels, including three in collaboration with his wife, novelist Marcia Muller, and twenty-nine in his popular "Nameless Detective" series. Pronzini has received three Shamus Awards, and six nominations for the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in nearly thirty countries.