WC Fields may be Hollywood's reigning jester, but he's no fool. For forty years he's cached over a million dollars of his lucre under assumed names in dozens of banks all over the country. The verdant towns have names like Coshocton, Ohio, and Rifle, Colorado. The noms de guerre have the distinctively Fieldsien ring of Otis Cribblecobblis, Quigley E. Sneersight, and Cormorant Beecham. But now a man who calls himself Lester O. Hipnoodle, a public menace with a maddeningly unspecified score to settle, has somehow lifted the great man's bankbooks and roams the nation cleaning out Fields' deposits.

America's flying fortresses successfully bomb the Nazi port of Rotterdam. In North Africa, General Montgomery advances on Rommel. British subs sink six Axis ships in the Mediterranean. And Toby Peters, the not always gainfully employed sleuth to the stars, has an assignment-get back Fields' money. From Altoona to Ottumwa, from Panguitch to Lompoc, Toby maneuvers a Cadillac sedan in the company of the martini-tippling, Indian club-juggling, pontificating Fields.

Hipnoodle taunts them with tantalizing clues and harries them with the occasional bullet. The ugly specter of the Ku Klux Klan and the immortal profile of John Barrymore cast their enigmatic shadows across their path. As Peters and Fields pursue their quarry, an additional, mysterious desperado lights on their tail, whose interest lies no so much in grabbing Fields' fortune as in canceling his-and Toby's-accounts. Permanently.

In the words of the perspicacious WC: "A glass of beer could be fatal and then where would the lovely urchins be?"

Stuart Kaminsky received the 1990 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery novel, as well as France’s Grand Prix de Roman d’Aventures in 1991. His love of the movies and long career as a professor of film history led him to create the popular and critically acclaimed Toby Peters series. He lives in Florida with his wife and children.