Steve Conacher, with his ulcer bumping gut, skip tracing a vanished cartoonist, Mike Smith, gets entangled with a mess of maggots when Smith's death by accident turns out to be murder. The connection with Luke Yorke, creator of a popular comic strip, and his business-family set-up, three stacked, and stacked again, babes, trouble with the police -- all figure in another killing and Conacher's play-off. Annoying.