During a boring departmental meeting at the university) Assistant Professor Dante Steele decides he has had enough of Ivory Tower Babel and walks out of the meeting—and out of his academic career.

Two years later he begins practice as a licensed Private Investigator, His first clients are former residents of a trailer park who were forced to move when the city of Hintern sold the park's land to a Lexington developer who planned to build a shopping center. Some sixty households were uprooted, some unable to move their homes and all facing rising rents elsewhere.

Steele's clients suspect that bribes from the developer greased the palms of city officials who voted for the project. They seek damages and vindication. Steele relishes the chance to provide some justice for little people and expose political corruption.

As other cases follow, Steele, imbued with his namesake Dante Alighieri's vision of hell, The Inferno, Steele muses often of the levels of hell waiting for wrongdoers who are auditioning for hell.

The first impression that many have of Steele, scholarly, cerebral, literate, causes them to underestimate his toughness—Dan Steele, the Underestimated P.I. He's no James Bond with a license to kill but he served two tours in Afghanistan as a marine officer in Psychological Warfare and is trained in martial arts. And does not hesitate to employ ruthless methods when necessary.