An agent of the Continental Detective Agency, known only as the Op, arrives in Personville, a mining town nicknamed Poisonville because corruption runs through its police, politicians and businessmen. Hired by a man who does not live to meet him, the Op decides to stay and clean the place up, playing the town's rival gangs against one another. The result is a spiral of scheming and violence in which the detective's own judgment is tested. Dark, fast and darkly funny, the novel is a founding work of hard-boiled crime fiction.