Frank Dodge, a struggling travel writer, has a hot tip: Miguel Ramirez could be one of the last surviving descendants of a gangster named John Looney. Dodge concocts a plan to meet the young man, but when Ramirez is found floating in the Mississippi River, Dodge finds himself without a story and on the wrong side of a murder investigation. As Dodge and his buddy, Brian Jefferson, disentangle the events of the night Ramirez died, clues about the death of Ramirez will come from an unlikely source: the life of John Looney.