Bryce Pedley is a 40s-era PI in modern day Latham, New York, complete with a fedora, a double-breasted suit, a shoulder harness, and a revolver. Where cops fail, he succeeds-and the cops take all the credit.

In The Laughing Dog, Samuel Cohen hires Pedley in a bar to find a rare book collection the Nazis stole in 1939. Locate rare books? Easy.

Except Pedley's not the only one searching for the books. Wilhelm Hoffmann, of Nazi ancestry, has already purchased several books from the lost collection and has no intention of stopping. After Pedley is beaten, abducted, and left to die, he realizes little of this is about rare books.

A stack of old WWII letters lead Pedley to a British Lieutenant and his driver who were in Bavaria in 1945 and to the greatest discovery of post-WWII. Confident he has the mystery figured out, the search leads Pedley to the basement of a house that hasn't been unoccupied for more than eight years.

Expectations are high.... but nothing is as he expected.