Brilliant crime historian and reluctant sleuth Jack Journey finds himself once again entangled with the criminal element as he takes on a search for the diaries of a long-dead Sicilian bandit that might hold the key to unraveling a huge network of organized crime.

First, a rare-book dealer from whom Journey has arranged to buy an old and valuable collection is found in his loft gruesomely stabbed with a billing spike. Missing is a priceless encyclopedia. Next, a man the killers ,istake for Journey is horribly burned to death in an outdoor market. And then the detective meets darkly exotic Laura Manville—beautiful and seductive—who enters Journey's life like a harbinger of disaster. After leaving his native Chicago to hunt for the killers in New York, he moves on to the treacherous underworld of PAris when clues lead to Europe. There, with growing horror, Journey begins to uncover a chilling link between the recent killings and a mysterious murder almost forty years before.