The police are convinced Charles Mauston's death was a suicide. His wife has other ideas, though an insurance policy for two hundred and fifty grand might have have something to do with that, and she hires a private investigator named James Tolliver to prove it was murder. Tolliver is all too familiar with the San Francisco of the 1930s, Chinatown gangs, White Russian émigrés, crooked cops, and everything else that makes up the city by the bay, and he's willing to do what it takes to show that Mauston's death was Murder After Midnight.