Conservative Yale law professor Amanda Fox lived for controversy and academic celebrity -- until someone decided she should die for them.

For Harvard economics professor Nikki Chase, it starts with a desperate call from her old friend Gary Fox, now a dean at Yale. His wife, Amanda, has been brutally stabbed to death in inner-city New Haven. The police soon arrest one of Amanda's students for the crime, but Nikki's investigation uncovers plenty of potential suspects. There's Max and Jared Fisch, bitterly feuding scions of a powerful right-wing family with as much to hide as it has millions to give Yale. High-profile activist Reverend Leroy Saunders had a wealth of philosophical -- and personal -- scores to settle with Amanda. And there's Gary himself, poised to become Yale's next president, who was on increasingly acrimonious and very public outs with his wife. As a powder keg of racial tension and political maneuverings threatens to ignite, Nikki draws on the help of old and new friends as she trails the real killer -- and deadly truths that will reverberate from Yale's gothic towers through New Haven's toughest streets.