It's January 1932 and Shanghai is about to explode. Private detective Jack Ford doesn't think things can get much worse, and then a young woman looking for a missing brother walks into his life. The search takes him from swank hotels and clubs through cabarets, back streets, and brothels, to the living hell of an urban battlefield. Rich and the poor, East and West, Chinese patriots and gangsters, Japanese militarists and thugs... A city of lost souls.