Margaret O'Mara is desperate to find her missing brother, Joe Colleran. She doesn't have a clue or a dime, and she hasn't seen her brother in thirty years. The last she heard, he was running a bar in Florida with an old war buddy, Michael Minogue. But when Minogue is discovered murdered on a Chicago pier, Margaret asks P.I. Paul Whelan to look in to it. As Whelan makes his rounds to the dilapidated apartment buildings and smoky bars of Chicago, he discovers that before his death, Minogue often talked of his old gang of close friends, which mysteriously broke apart after World War II. Their stories take Whelan through the abandon ruins of Riverview Park, once Chicago's famous amusement park and the site of a forty-year-old unsolved murder. Now, Whelan must sift through the past to find a killer who stalks the present, and Minogue's old friends who still carefully conceal a dark secret that binds them together.