San Francisco, 1947. The War has ended and Sgt. Alexander Blade, former kiddie heartthrob of the silent screen, returns to San Francisco to start life anew as a private investigator. He rents an office near Chinatown, hires an exotic dancer as his secretary, and tries to make sense of crazy, post-war San Francisco. He's got a new client, a real oddball with a husband who's gone missing. But when Blade's former Hollywood cameraman shows up at the office as dead as fried oysters (with a cash retainer in hand), Blade is drawn into a series of bizarre deaths of former silent film child actors from Monarch Studios, his old employer. The cops say accidental death, but Blade suspects murder. To find the killer, Blade must revisit a time when Hollywood knew him as Buster Blade, Wonder Boy of the Westerns. While tracking down his client's missing husband, Blade searches the ruins of an abandoned movie studio, where he discovers, too late, that he's been cast in a final scene that can only end in his murder. Cold War, Hot Lead is the first Mace Palmer novel featuring Alex "Buster" Blade, the Frisco Detective. Blade lives in the pulp magazine, noir era of the 1940s, where modern sensibilities barely exist.