Six close friends are murdered on Hunter's Point, near the Bremerton Naval Base, during a home invasion robbery in 1941 that turned gruesome. The local sheriff recruits Seattle's best detectives to help him with the worst case he's ever seen. Private detectives Alan Stewart and Vera Deward team again with police detective Ben Kearney to work the case. When they arrive at the beach house, they find a deputy has charged the locals a quarter apiece to wander through the horrific scene unsupervised, and one victim's nylons have been stolen off her dead body, along with her shoes.
Sympathy for the retired bootleggers doesn't run deep in the farming community, which feels the Fielders hadn't come by their money honestly, from the sweat of their brows. They believed taking advantage of a man's craving for alcohol was sinful, and the wages garnered were tainted.
Displaying tenacity, grit, and cleverness, the detectives unearth leads that lead them across the state, chasing the treachery and corruption of that era to its own appropriate finale.
