It's about a T-Man who goes undercover to bust an illegal booze racket. Someone's making good quality spirits and distributing it all over California, taking a bite out of legitimate distributors profits and, of course, cheating the government out of tax money.

Agent Kon Jensen, of Danish descent, follows his best friend and fellow agent who's just been murdered on the job in a northern California coastal town.

Nobody would ever accuse Flynn of being squaemish or restrained, so there's a lot of sex and violence for a 1959 novel here. The books opens with Jensen, accused of murder, being given the third degree by the Assistant DA and the cops.

After proving to the reader that he could wipe the floor with these guys if he wanted to, Jensen is locked in jail after getting hit with a cheap shot. All this before we know much of anything that's going on.

Flynn takes us back to the beginning of the story after that, where we meet Jensen's boss and the soon to be murdered fellow agent. At home and on the case Jensen is able to get really close to beautiful women who don't like it when he starts something without finishing it.

There are gangsters and crooked cops as well as an honest cop who suspects what Jensen is up to. This is undiluted mid-century hardboiled crime fiction with no apologies. There's even a twist at the end that allows for a Spillane-like moment (which Hammett had done first).

Reading this book is like watching a black-and-white crime movie from the '50s, if such movies had been allowed to be rated R. I'm looking forward to reading more from Flynn.