It's the Korean War. Business is booming. Baseball is the national sport. If they could bottle the smell of hot dogs on a summer day at the park, someone would become a millionaire. Reds - Russian Reds, not ichink ones -have infiltrated the entire government. They are everywhere and Joe McCarthy has decided to root them out (and if he gains some personal power in the meantime, well those are just the spoils of war.) Jake, a former OSS agent who tracked down Nazi networks after the war (and made a ton of money in the process) is running a small private detective agency mostly for appearances and to account for his income, when he is approached by an old friend Nick, who brings along Senator McCarthy who wants to hire Jake for a small job. He is to break into the house of the "Ice Maiden", a beautiful commie agent who has a list (McCarthy, like Arlen Specter, was obsessed with those lists that always seemed to remain in his pocket) of reds in government.
Jake takes along a couple of friends, succesfully gains entry to the building and a couple of safes where he discovers not a list of names, but pornigraphic photographs of prominent men in in flagrante delicto (such a delicious phrase, that) with the Ice Queen and one of those is "Tail-Gunner Joe" in positions befitting his nickname. He also discovers drawings that appear to be of a bomb and lots of writing in Korean. Realizing he is getting into the middle of an extortion racket, he turns photographs of everything over to Nick and opts out - he hopes. Then he becomes the target.
I must say that for some odd reason, baseball has been a theme in several recent books. Baseball lore provides an important backdrop to this story (even includes a picture of Ebbetts field, although why is totally beyond my comprehenson) and Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall mysteries by Robert Parker also have baseball lore permeating the story.
