Milwaukee, 1932. The Great Depression is in full swing, Prohibition is nearing its end, and the private-investigation business is changing fast. Hicks McTaggart—once a strikebreaker, now a down-on-his-luck private eye—thinks he’s finally found a little stability. Then comes the assignment that sends everything sideways: track down Daphne Airmont, the runaway heiress to a vast Wisconsin cheese fortune.

What begins as a routine case quickly spirals into something far stranger. Chasing a missing heiress across oceans and borders, Hicks finds himself drifting from Depression-era Milwaukee to the ports and backrooms of Central Europe, caught among mobsters, spies, swing musicians, and the uneasy rise of fascism.

As conspiracies multiply and loyalties blur, Hicks navigates a world where politics, crime, and capital collide in absurd and dangerous ways. With danger closing in and history shifting beneath his feet, he pieces together a mystery that stretches far beyond one vanished woman—into the tangled machinery of power itself, where paranoia and comedy dance side by side and the line between chaos and design grows ever harder to see.

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