It's 1922 and President Warren G. Harding is sleeping around. Everyone knows it.
When reporter Sophie Cruz gets a tip from a young mother who says, "Hey, check out my weirdly tall blue-eyed baby--he doesn't just look like the president," and with lurid love letters to back it up, it's clear she's landed what newsmen and confectioners call "a great scoop" one that'll end a presidency and launch her career.
But to newspaper baron Tobias Krohly, Harding's dirty letters are more than a scoop. They are leverage for his own political ambitions.
With the help of his loyal and helplessly rotund assistant, Keith Keeth, Krohly turns the machinery of his media empire against Sophie as she chases leads on the ground. Their race for the letters sends ripples through the intersecting worlds of a scar-faced bootlegger, an idealistic Internal Revenue agent, and a former killer who's been basically forced into retirement because he can't quit falling asleep. Things turn dangerous quick when she falls into the orbit of a yellow-suited stranger, tall and handsome, with those pricey new tortoise-shell Eckelburg sunglasses. He's got a mansion on Long Island Sound. Carries a gun. His tax return says: Pharmacist.
Meanwhile Cruz and Krohly are drawn back to the place where their stories first crossed: the Caribbean nation of San Mara, Sophie's home, where Krohly's reckless wartime reporting has conjured something the locals won't mention except in whispers.
Now it is turning up in their city.
