From inside front cover: Annie Hannigan, an out-of-control teenager, jitterbugging in the 1930s ... dreams of offing her mother, Elsie, whom she blames for abandoning her for a job soon after her father, a cop, was shot and killed. Elsie, now employed by ... an over-the-hill and perpetually soused private eye, finds herself covering up his missteps as she is drawn into a case of a mysterious client, who leads her into a decade-long drama of deception and dual identities sprawling from the Depression era to World War II Hollywood and the jungles of the South Pacific.