Contrition doesn't help when detective Joe Goodey accidentally shoots the cousin of Mayor Sanford L. Kolchik--he's kicked off the SFPD and booted out of town. However, he's then given a second chance as a private dick when the mayor's mistress, go-go dancer Tina D'Oro, turns up a corpse. The irreverent, cynical gumshoe knows her funeral was ""bound to be open-coffin, but would Tina be topless?"" Goodey proceeds slowly--hampered by assorted Chinese delinquents who invade his North Beach apartment, and harassed by his wife to grant her a divorce--as he goes over a list of suspects that includes a bust-building plastic surgeon and an ex-hood living in an old age home. Not a Goodey Two-Shoes but a flip hardnose who appears to have a future ahead of him.