Cincinnati police detective Sonora Blair works homicide - a dark haul of spoiled lives and dangerous people. Some days, Sonora doesn't want to be a cop. Not when she had to sit down with a distraught husband and father of two young children to tell him that the body parts turning up along Interstate 75 belong to his missing wife. Julia Winchell witnessed a murder eight years earlier - a murder that was never solved and not forgotten. A murder in which the body disappeared and the killer vanished. No one believed her. Eight years later, Julia thought she saw the killer. She went after him alone and turned up dead. Before she died she tried to contact Gage Caplan, a golden-boy district attorney in the process of scoring a very major and very public victory. Caplan's pregnant wife was the murder victim eight years before. Was Julia Winchell trying to help, or was she pointing a finger at him? Sonora is certain the two murders are related. But her investigation brings down some intense heat on her and her partner during an already sweltering summer. And it soon becomes clear that the killer, left undisturbed for eight years, is back in business in Cincinnati.