Private investigator Paul Whelan works out of Chicago’s seamy, gritty Uptown, an immigrant neighborhood full of vagrants, runaways, and all too often, murder. Whelan is asked by an elderly woman to locate a runaway boy that she had once taken in. After inquiring from his sources, he finds out the boy was a runner for a burglary and car-theft ring, and three former members of that ring have been found murdered in the past month. All the evidence suggests that the boy is dead as well. But Whelan, ever persistent, keeps asking questions, especially when he discovers one of the murdered men was the brother of a good childhood friend. What he finds along the way leads him into a dangerous maze of complicated loyalties, where neither the police nor possible witnesses will cooperate.