Santa Fe private detectives Joshua Croft and Rita Mondragon have recently become much more than friends and business partners. When Rita is shot and wounded, perhaps mortally, by the same vicious psychopath who tried to kill her once before, Joshua sets out to find the man. His pursuit takes him from the mountains of New Mexico to a posh Denver suburb, from the bleak plains of Kansas to the sweltering depths of the Florida Everglades. Along the way, he meets a sleazy former prison inmate, an eighty-year-old computer expert, a brutal drug dealer, a somber homicide cop, and a hardened mercenary with a very peculiar hobby. As Joshua races across the length of the United States toward a final confrontation with a savage killer, he also travels back through his own past, to the beginning of his relationship with the woman who now lies near death.