Hugh Turley, of Word to the Wise Investigations, NYC, is acting like a chump. He's hung up on Dr. Samantha Dale, the beautiful young psychiatrist whose life he has saved twice, and who has left him for a man with big money. Turley is gut-sick about it. For a man who makes a living getting rid of problems for other people, he is unexpectedly unable to cope with this one. To make matters worse, Turley hooks up with a dame who is poison. A dangerously psychotic nymphomaniac posing as a meek little mouse. Not content with that, he sets himself up for a potential prison sentence by covering up for a cop he caught in the act of homicide. And to top it all off, he ends up in the sights of a serial- killing sniper. Into this mix steps Samantha Dale, determined to pick up where she left off with Turley. Not so easy, she finds, after encountering the six-foot-tall nude nympho in Turley's bedroom. Samantha wins the enduing battle, but that's not the end of the war. Despite her lofty I.Q., Samantha is in some ways as hard-headed as private eye Hugh Turley. After her hard-won repossession project she can't resist pumping Turley for details about his career. In doing so she finds more than she has bargained for. Samantha takes Turley through a psychoanalytic flashback to his days aboard a tramp freighter, his entanglement with murderous dope smugglers in the Mediterranean, and his gunfight with a gang of terrorists on a rooftop in the lower East Side of Manhattan.Along the way Samantha clashes with her rival again, and teaches Turley a few things about detective work herself on a mountain top in Colorado. The story is told from the viewpoint of Turley himself, and we occasionally get a glimpse of some of the details he is determined to leave out. Like for instance the murder he has promised to carry out for a blackmailer who is as dangerous as a cobra hiding in the weeds.In this reversal of the theme of "Scheherazade," the story of the Sultan's wife who saved herself by spinning a different tale for each of a thousand nights, in Samanthazade it is the heroine who elicits stories from her lover. Samantha, the super-inquisitive shrink, insists upon hearing about incidents from the career of Hugh Turley, and once he realizes the power of the therapy she is providing he is more than willing to submit to Samantha's ministrations. Everybody has an agenda, though. For Samantha it is to get Turley wound down enough to eventually talk him into abandoning the dangerous trade of detective work. After all, she has already seen him involved in three separate gun battles while standing at her side.Turley's agenda is exactly the opposite. It is to get Samantha sufficiently clued in about the work he does through Word to the Wise that she will understand why he does it. But how is a woman who grew up in a cultured family and is smart enough to skip through years of school at a time going to see what motivates a guy who grew up in the Bronx? Turley walked some tough streets coming up, and saw some stuff he didn't like. He became a cop, only to find that their hands were tied by the politicians. They hadn't cut the legs out from under the private investigators, though, so that's the place for Turley. If you're tough enough, and if you can keep your cool in the clutch, you can get things done for people that the cops can't.So far, fair enough on both sides. But the hitch is that in the course of her investigation Samantha prompts Turley to divulge details of incidents with the potential to lose him his P.I. license and maybe send him to prison. With each revelation of the events of Turley's violent past, the odds increase that Samantha is placing herself in danger by getting Turley to spill his guts. Will Samantha go too far? And what will happen if she does? The outcome hinges on one important question: just how sane is Hugh Turley, after all?