Twelve-year-old Aaron Broom is protecting his father’s car from repossession when he witnesses a jewelry store robbery gone wrong. To Aaron’s shock, his father, a struggling salesman in the wrong place at the wrong time, is fingered as the prime suspect in the murder. Aaron --- precocious, plucky, not a little naïve --- must seek out gangsters, diamond dealers, bootleggers and street kids in order to prove his father’s innocence. In his search for justice, Aaron draws upon the resources of a world-weary paperboy, an aspiring teen journalist and a kindly lawyer. As they dig into the details of the case, these unconventional detectives reveal a cover-up that goes much deeper than a jewelry-store heist gone sour.

In June of 1961, A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke: a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over nearly a decade. In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway divulged to Hotchner the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris, the real part of each literary woman he'd later create. And he told of the mischief that made him a legend: of impotence cured in a house of God; of a plane crash in the African bush; of F. Scott Fitzgerald dispensing romantic advice; of midnight champagne with Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love.