Detective Zephyr Davies has worries about his romance with lovely Eurasian Monica Marshall. Smart, charmingly eccentric, and sexy as hell, the one woman who finally won his heart, also seems capable of cutting it out of his chest cavity, chopping it up, sautéing it with onions and mushrooms, and serving it with a radiant smile on her face. How can someone so lovely be so deadly? In this sequel to Chinese Puzzle the mystery begins with a man disappearing from an elaborately sealed shipboard cabin and moves on to the fog-shrouded streets of prohibition era San Francisco where guarded sanctuaries provide no protection from a killer whose cunning and cruelty is not restrained by the shackles of sanity.