They meet in a no-name diner. A shadowy man hands Burke a CD-dossier of someone he wants found. Minutes later, as Burke watches from an alley, his client is gunned down by a professional hunter-killer team. Burke slips away, unsure if he's been spotted. Later, when he examines the dossier, he discovers that the missing woman is Beryl Preston, a girl he'd rescued from a brutal pimp twenty years earlier - when she was only 13 - and returned to her father. Now he has to find her again - not just because she might be in danger, but because he has to make sure he didn't wrong her the first time. His search will force him to confront a new kind of human ugliness, and, finally, to practice the survivalist triage that has marked - and cursed - his life since childhood. In Mask Market, Burke the outlaw investigator finds himself searching for the truth: not only about a girl named Beryl, but also about himself.

This is classic Burke: dark, dangerous, and galvanizing, from the opening scene to the explosive climax.