Margaret Slone doesn't like being called Maggie, so that's exactly what her city editor calls her. Wise-cracking, quick-tempered Maggie has a nose for news and a finely developed faculty for finding trouble which begin to operate simultaneously when Ned McGowan, a brilliant physician and notorious philanderer, is found dead in his hotel room. The medico claimed that the victim had been dead for at least fifteen hours as rigor mortis was advanced. But Maggie knows differently; she had talked to Ned a mere seven hours before.

This strange, unsolved murder catapults Maggie off on a round of combined news-hawking and detection that takes her all over New Orleans and deep into the bayous. There is a great maze of mystery surrounding Ned McGowan's life, further complicated by his many women-enigmatic Lili Cheng, wealthy Marta Dellman, Lucille, the nurse, and Olivette, not to mention Maggie's own sister, Vangie, who becomes so suspect she's jailed by the fumbling Detective Beton.

In her quest to get to the bottom of the mystery, Maggie stumbles across the body of a beautiful young woman in the gloom of an old French Quarter house. Close on the heels of this gruesome discovery, she is more perplexed than ever by the sudden disappearance of a second young woman and the shooting of a man seemingly as far removed from the case as he is from the moon. Peppery Maggie Slone must talk her way into trouble and out again to clear her sister's name and get the real story behind a completely baffling murder case.