It starts with a phone call Mike Daley never expected to get, from District Attorney Prentice Marshall Gates III, San Francisco's chief law enforcement officer and front-runner candidate for California attorney general. Friends they're not; Skipper Gates had led the charge to get Mike fired from his job as a partner in a prestigious law firm. But Gates needs Daley now - and needs him badly. He's just been arrested. It seems that a couple of hours earlier he woke up in an armchair in his hotel room and found the dead body of a young male prostitute in the bed. The details that continue to emerge from the crime scene are tabloid heaven. The SFPD is certain Gates did it. The prosecutors are already talking the death penalty, and there's nothing in the mounting evidence, and certainly not in Gate's unpersuasive denials, to convince Daley and his partner (and ex-wife) Rosie of his innocence. But even if he's lying, it's their job to defend him, and that means finding out what really happened. Sure enough, the deeper they dig, the seamier their findings. An array of influential power brokers is all too ready to cover questionable activities that may - or may not - connect with the victim. There's a campaign manager with his own dirty secrets, a shady Internet entrepreneur who trades flesh for cash, a prominent businessman who uses muscle to keep his enterprise prospering. Mike and Rosie chase down trails that take them from the lowest depths of the Mission District, where drugs and bodies are always for sale, to the gated mansions of Pacific Heights, all the while contending with a trial that gets under way even as they are frantically trying to piece together what is really at stake in the case against Gates.