Master crime novelist and creative writing professor Frank Hall is asked by his longtime friend Gillian Morgan to help locate her missing son Damien. Troubled and recovering from a history of drug addiction, Damien had recently found purpose and a fresh start as Frank’s pupil and mentee. But Gillian is worried that he may have suffered a relapse, that he may just need help coming home. So, as a favor to Gillian, Frank agrees to help her find him.

Frank’s search for Damien turns up several hidden details of Damien’s personal life—including evidence of an affair with a most unlikely individual. But the quest ends in tragedy one day later, when Frank finds Damien dead of an apparent drug overdose.

To the investigating authorities, Damien’s death seems an open-and-shut case of relapse by a former addict who simply could not stay clean. But to Frank’s eyes—eyes seasoned by years of crime research and intimate friendship with Damien’s family—it looks like far more. It looks like murder, craftily concealed and carefully planned.

When the police refuse to examine Damien’s death as a homicide, Frank decides that he’ll just have to do it himself, if only for the sake of Damien’s grieving mother. And the more Frank investigates, the more determined he grows to get to the truth. Even if that means incurring the wrath of the fiery and territorial lead detective assigned to Damien’s case.

But Frank soon finds that he’s in for far more than he imagined. A cunning, ruthless sociopath took Damien Morgan’s life—a sociopath who does not want the motive for Damien’s murder exposed. A sociopath who has killed many times before and who will not hesitate to kill again.