Private detective Peter O’Keefe has survived three gunfights with the local mafia and is still recovering from wounds from a car bomb. No one knows who planted that bomb, but most people suspect it was Carmine Jagoda’s local mafia “Outfit.” O’Keefe doesn’t think the Outfit did it but must suffer isolation in almost every aspect of his life, including separation from his daughter Kelly, because no one wants to be, as he says, “within bombing distance” of him. His only dependable companion is Karma, a retired bomb-detecting German Shepherd police dog.

Finding existence under these circumstances intolerable, O’Keefe embarks on a dual quest—find out who the bombing culprits were and, assuming it was the Jagoda Outfit, negotiate a peace of some kind. Both efforts only lead him into further peril.

At the same time, his eleven-year-old daughter Kelly is faced with the impending highly distasteful possibility of her mother’s upcoming marriage to a man that Kelly despises. She sets out on her own investigative adventure to follow up her hunch that the handsome but creepy, leering doctor her mom plans to marry is a fraud.  

O’Keefe’s efforts to negotiate with the Outfit lead to Rose Jagoda, daughter of recently deceased boss Carmine Jagoda, who has become co-head of the Outfit with Paul Marcone. It turns out that she wants nothing but out of the criminal life. Rose and O’Keefe embark on a mission to free each of them, in their different ways, from the Outfit’s curse, a mission complicated by the efforts of prosecutor and O’Keefe enemy Russell Lord to break the Outfit, including Rose, once and for all.

After a flurry of suspense, double crosses, murder, and mayhem, can there be a glimmer of hope for O'Keefe, Rose, Kelly and Karma?