“What would Marlow do?” He asked himself. Private investigator James Gardiner, a young man who dreams of a practice like the pulp detectives of old, takes on a seemingly simple case: helping a beautiful, older woman evade another detective who is tailing her. But when his client goes missing and the man following her turns up dead, James is dragged into a dangerous conspiracy of crooked politicians, real estate scams, and long-buried family secrets, forcing him to confront the line between his noir fantasies and the perilous reality of Los Angeles.