In the midst of Albany’s grimmest winter in yeans–and Albany has seen some grim ones–Don Strachey can only grumble and daydream about moving to the tropics as he trudges through the icy drifts to the police pound to pick up his car, towed away the night before by snow removal crews, Albany’s only efficient civil service. His mood gets decidedly worse when he finds a dead body in his car, and worse still when he discovers that the dead man is the grandson of the legendary, retired, 96-year-old godfather of Albany’s political machine. Nor does it make him exactly lighthearted when he finds that this young man has left a $2.5 million-dollar legacy to be used to destroy the Albany machine and a letter asking Don Strachey to help him do it.

Complexities ensue as Albany’s only gay gumshoe does his best to fulfil the dead man’s moral mission, an unpleasant, not to say unhealthful, undertaking that leads to encounters with drug traffickers, desperate pols, and members of a family whose dark history may hold the key to Albany’s political future–and Strachey’s survival.