While her friends are making mad cash and getting massages at their dot-com jobs, Amy Gray quits her low-status publishing position to realize her girlhood dream of being a private investigator. Joining a small Manhattan agency, she finds herself plunged into an intriguing world of "con men, lunatics, narcissists, polygamists, sociopaths, felons, petty thieves, and pathological liars”—a description almost as apt for the men in her social life as for her on-the-job subjects. Working with a gang of misfit colleagues (a former zookeeper, a one-time child star, an avant-garde philosopher, and other eccentrics), Amy discovers even more about herself as she detects uncanny parallels between her investigations and her tumultuous love life.