While in San Diego, plus-sized P.I. Jo Fuller does a favor for the worried and way too fashionably thin Sally Rhymer by looking into her daughter Amy's involvement with some do-gooders. Jo, as sassy as she is statuesque, becomes the life of the party when she tells off Mrs. Rhymer's drunken and disorderly ex, Admiral Rhymer—and then walks into a crime scene, the quite unnatural death of the Admiral's friend, a defense contractor.

It seems big, beautiful Amy's problems are small compared to the rest of her larger-than-life family. The admiral has disappeared and a ransom note confirms Jo's worst suspicion: The old goat has been kidnapped. An empty safe that once contained top-secret documents, a family that isn't sure it wants to pay a ransom to get the old man back, and a desperate blackmailer put Jo in the crosshairs of a killer's line of fire.