The first Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery. Introducing Bernie Rhodenbarr, N.Y.C.'s prince of thieves - who really should have known better! When the mysterious pear shaped man with a lot of uncomfortably accurate information about Bernie and his career offered him five big ones to liberate a blue leather box - unopened - from an East Side apartment, it would have been a good time to plead a previous engagement..but times were tough. Everything was straightforward - the box was where it should have been but before the liberation took place, two men in blue coats turned up. Still all was not lost, there was always a way to work things out...that was before they discovered the body in the bedroom and Bernie decided to leg it.

For nearly a year Bernie Rhodenbarr has gone straight...well of a fashion. But Bernie has a new landlord for his Greenwich Village bookstore - Bernie Stoppelagard - not a nice man, who wants to increase his rent by 10,000 dollars...a month! Desperate times call for desperate measures. So Bernie is back to work burgling an apartment of a couple on a European tour of untraceable cash. There is only one problem - the naked man in the bathroom - and the fact that he is deceased. At the same time the apartment of Stoppelgard's brother-in-law has been relieved of a million dollar baseball card collection and somehow Bernie is being blamed (read: framed) for that crime. Mix in a mysterious woman and a crotchety old New York policeman and Bernie seems in big trouble. So what's the answer...Find the baseball cards...and steal them back.