Dealing with the mafia is dangerous. Niro Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin were once again convinced of this when they took on the job of representing Daisy Perrit, the king of New York’s black market—and found themselves pulled into the whirlpool of gangster disputes.
Daisy Perrit has complicated family problems. He wants to save his daughter’s life from the inevitable gangster conflicts, so he resorts to a trick. He hires a certain young woman to pretend to be his daughter. Taking advantage of Perrit’s hopeless position, she begins to extort large sums of money from him. Wolfe’s task is to rein in her appetite without revealing the secret.