A bomb destroys local smuggler Stuffy Keegan's truck in Milwaukee, drawing private detective Hicks McTaggart into the chaos that follows.

Boynt Crosstown assigns Hicks to find Daphne Airmont, a cheese magnate's daughter who has run away with jazz clarinetist Hop Wingdale.

Thessalie Wayward explains asportation and apportation to Hicks, framing his vanishing beavertail weapon as a genuine paranormal event.

Uncle Lefty takes Hicks to a bowling alley that turns out to be a well-funded secret gathering place for American Nazis.

Hicks visits the Airmont mansion and learns about Bruno's criminal cheese empire, his radioactive cheese product, and his ties to Al Capone.

Don Peppino's henchmen, dressed as Christmas elves, deliver an explosive package to Hicks, confirming that the Mafia boss wants him dead.

Hicks wakes aboard the ocean liner Stupendica with no memory of boarding, having been drugged and shipped to Europe against his will.

British spies Alf and Philippa Quarrender introduce Hicks to the shadowy world of European espionage aboard the Stupendica and warn that war is coming.

Interpol agent Egon Praediger meets Hicks in Belgrade and recruits him to find Ace Lomax, Bruno Airmont's missing former lieutenant.

In Budapest, Dr. Zoltán von Kiss assigns Hicks to help recover a legendary and extraordinarily tasteless table lamp lost during an apportation error.

Hicks finds Daphne Airmont performing at the Tropikus Club in Budapest, and she asks him to help locate the vanished Hop Wingdale.

Ace Lomax is captured by the antisemitic Vladboys biker gang at a fascist training camp near the Hungarian-Croatian border.

Hop Wingdale and Zdeněk the golem storm the Vladboys camp, free Ace Lomax at gunpoint, and escape using an improvised explosive.

Daphne reunites with Hop in Fiume, learns of his secret anti-fascist network, ends their relationship, and decides to sail back to America.

Stuffy Keegan confronts Bruno Airmont aboard the U-13 submarine with news that a military coup has deposed Roosevelt and installed General MacArthur.

Hicks McTaggart is a Milwaukee private detective who reluctantly takes an assignment to find Daphne Airmont, the runaway daughter of a powerful cheese magnate, after a bomb disrupts the city and a paranormal expert introduces him to the phenomena of asportation. After uncovering a Nazi movement growing in Milwaukee and surviving a Mafia assassination attempt, Hicks is drugged and shipped involuntarily to Europe, where he navigates a world of spies, Interpol agents, and supernatural specialists. In Budapest he finally locates Daphne, only to take on yet another unwanted task — finding her missing musician boyfriend, Hop Wingdale — which leads him to a fascist training camp in Croatia. There, Hop and an unconventional ally free the captured Ace Lomax, Bruno Airmont's former right-hand man, in the novel's most explosive confrontation with fascist violence. Daphne ultimately ends her relationship with Hop in the port city of Fiume and chooses to sail home on her own terms, completing Hicks's assignment almost incidentally. The novel closes with a devastating revelation: a military coup back in America has made Hicks's return impossible, leaving him stranded in a darkening Europe with no country left to go home to.

The headline events that drag Hicks McTaggart from Milwaukee to Europe and beyond.

Pharmacist Hoagie Hivnak tells Hicks the bomb is likely not Italian Mafia work but is connected to a secret war in the dairy industry.

Petty crook Lino Trapanese warns Hicks at April's club that something suspicious is going on with his Uncle Lefty.

Lew Basnight teaches Hicks a gun trick from his Wild West days and warns him not to become a metaphysical detective chasing revelation.

Hicks takes April Randazzo to Chicago to see Bela Lugosi in Dracula, one of their last romantic outings before his forced departure from the city.

Skeet Wheeler's underground radio crew intercepts a signal from the U-13, an unsurrendered Austro-Hungarian submarine prowling beneath Lake Michigan.

Hicks accompanies Stuffy Keegan to the lake shore, where Stuffy vanishes aboard the U-13 submarine and disappears from Milwaukee entirely.

FBI agent O'Grizbee pressures Hicks at the federal courthouse, threatening legal action if Hicks refuses to work undercover for the bureau.

At the Airmont mansion, Hicks meets G. Rodney Flaunch, Daphne's self-appointed fiancé who is openly angling to marry into the family fortune.

Hicks recalls the midnight speedboat chase across the lake during which he helped Daphne escape from a sinister rehabilitation doctor named Swampscott Vobe.

Hicks says goodbye to April Randazzo at the Milwaukee train station as he departs for New York on a decisively one-way ticket.

Aboard the Stupendica, Hicks meets journalist Glow Tripforth del Vasto and her unscrupulous autogyro-dealer husband Porfirio, a suspected jewel thief and duelist.

Terike takes Hicks in her motorcycle sidecar to deliver radio valves for an all-female theremin performance at Club Hypotenuse in Budapest.

Russian spy Vassily Midoff escapes the British intelligence agents tracking him by boarding a watermelon-painted zeppelin bound for Brazil.

Daphne is rescued from a Hamburg bar overrun by Nazis by journalist Glow Tripforth del Vasto, who arrives flying an autogyro.

Dippy Chazz Foditto tells Hicks that April has married Don Peppino and is pregnant, warning Hicks that returning to Milwaukee would be fatal.

Before Hicks accepts his assignment, the world around him is already fracturing: a pharmacist connects the Milwaukee bomb to a secret dairy war, a criminal informant tips him off to trouble close to home, and a retired gunfighter teaches him a Wild West trick while warning him not to chase metaphysical mysteries. A romantic night at the movies marks one of Hicks's last carefree evenings with April Randazzo before the Mafia threat and his forced departure reshape his life. On Lake Michigan, Hicks witnesses Stuffy Keegan's impossible disappearance aboard a rogue Austro-Hungarian submarine, while the FBI applies its own coercive pressure to accelerate his departure. As Hicks journeys through Europe, supporting encounters prove equally significant: a motorcycle ride through Budapest leads him to the journalist who points him toward Daphne, a Russian spy's absurd escape on a zeppelin underscores the continent's disintegrating intelligence landscape, and Daphne herself is rescued from a Nazi-filled Hamburg bar by an unlikely savior in a flying machine. By the novel's close, the news that April has married a Mafia boss and is pregnant with his child permanently seals the door on Hicks's former life in Milwaukee.

The supporting moments that shape Hicks's world before, during, and after his assignment.

Uncle Lefty defends Adolf Hitler over a family dinner, dismissing the newsreels and blaming Jewish figures in the media for distorting the Nazi leader's image.

Hicks recalls the moment his beavertail weapon vanished from his hand just before he could strike a young protester, ending his career as a strikebreaker.

At the Nuremberg Lanes, Hicks recognizes his old strikebreaking mentor Ooly Schaufl, who has reinvented himself as a committed American Nazi.

Boynt reveals the FBI is a front for wealthy industrialists fighting left-wing politics, then orders Hicks to stop resisting and accept the Airmont assignment.

Hicks drops the Christmas elf henchmen's suspicious package into Lake Michigan, where it explodes and sends three varieties of trout into the air.

In New York, Hicks discovers he has been issued a passport and steamship ticket he never requested, revealing that unseen forces have already decided his fate.

The Quarrenders reveal they are MI3b spies on a worldwide recruiting mission and warn Hicks that things will never return to the way they were.

Egon hands Hicks a brand-new Walther PPK, reveals that Budapest is the global center of apportation activity, and orders him to find Ace Lomax.

Hicks allows Ace Lomax to walk free after a tense gunpoint standoff and a brief conversation about baseball, letting the lamp assignment collapse.

Pip Quarrender reveals that Egon Praediger is secretly working for the Ustashe, a Nazi-backed fascist Croatian nationalist organization.

Hicks and Daphne sleep together at her Budapest hotel after she explains that she and Hop have always had a free and forgiving arrangement.

Hop Wingdale reveals to his agent Nigel Trevelyan that his European music tour is a cover for scouting escape routes for Jewish people fleeing fascism.

Ace Lomax tells Hop that Bruno Airmont offered to pay him to commit an assassination, which was the moment Ace decided to abandon Bruno's employ.

Bruno gives Daphne access to a Swiss bank account holding damaging secrets about the International Cheese Syndicate, effectively naming her his criminal successor.

Hicks calls his estranged mother from Fiume and accepts his exile is permanent, then Terike promises to teach him Hungarian and kisses him.

The turning points of Shadow Ticket begin before the main plot, as Uncle Lefty's casual dinner-table defense of Adolf Hitler and Hicks's haunted memory of a weapon that once vanished from his hand reveal how close the story's world stands to violence and fascism. A sequence of revelations then accelerates Hicks's departure from Milwaukee: his boss exposes the FBI's true loyalties, a bomb in Lake Michigan confirms Mafia danger, and a surprise passport waiting at a New York bank proves that unseen forces have already decided his fate. In Europe, each new mission delivers a fresh shock: the Quarrenders confirm that war is inevitable and already being prepared for, a corrupt Interpol agent turns out to be secretly working for fascists, and Hicks discovers that the jazz clarinetist he has been chasing is actually running a covert Jewish refugee network. The emotional centre of the European journey arrives when Hicks and Daphne become lovers in Budapest, and when Ace Lomax reveals that Bruno Airmont tried to have Hop Wingdale assassinated — the betrayal that drove Ace to abandon his criminal life. The final pair of revelations — Bruno secretly transferring his criminal empire to Daphne through a Swiss bank account, and Hicks accepting permanent exile in a brief call to his estranged mother — close the novel on a bittersweet note of irreversible loss and quiet, tentative renewal.

The key decisions, discoveries, and revelations that transform Hicks and the world around him.