Lots of strange things get washed up in Chicago’s sewers, and even tough Irishman Jimmy Flannery feels jumpy when he is sent to to inspect old tunnels. He keeps thinking about those stories of kids flushing down baby alligators that grow up into the big man-eating monsters alive down in the dark. And it doesn’t calm Flannery’s nerves when he stumbles onto a body. Or rather two halves of a body.
Now, reporting the corpse to the cops would have ended the incident for anybody else. But Jimmy Flannery doesn’t turn his back on trouble on his turf. He tracks it down. And when he finds the dead man really had been chewed in half by a huge crocodile — he knows his trouble has murder written all over it.
For at the bottom of this smelly situation is the stink of political corruption and big-time crime. There is something rotten in Chicago! And whether the decay is spreading from downtown in City Hall or underground in the sewers, Jimmy Flannery uses all his street smarts and exploits all his power connections — to say nothing of risking his life — to find out the who, what, and why of so fishy a murder.