It's two years after the death of Tim Hess, her partner and the father of her child, and Merci is working hard to do her job, take care of her son, and hold it all together. She and her son are living with her father, and she is dating Mike McNally, a respected fellow officer. Merci and Mike are the golden couple on the force - both kids of retired cops, and both highly competent officers in their own right. And even if Merci doesn't passionately love Mike, there's a sort of comfortable inevitability to it all.That explodes when a young prostitute, the mysterious Aubrey Whittaker, is found brutally murdered and Mike emerges as the primary suspect. Merci, the lead investigator on the case, must do the unthinkable: expose and arrest her lover. Sifting through the clues with a growing sense of panic and outrage in her gut - guilt that she might be sealing Mike's fate mixed with horror at what he might have done - Merci has to work hard to balance where the truth leads against where her heart is telling her to go. Meanwhile, an old unsolved case from the sixties is thrown on her desk, the murder of Patti Bailey, another prostitute with ties to the force. The two cases conspire to turn Merci's world upside down and challenge everything she had taken for granted. Read Less