Stubbornness has landed private eye V.I. Warshawski in big
trouble at her Chicago office. With her grand old Loop
building set to be razed, she's become a hold-out tenant
amid frayed wiring and scary, empty corridors. Then she
finds a homeless woman with three kids in the basement, and
before she can rescue them, they disappear. Worst of all,
she's been implicated in a murder--after the body of Deirdre
Messenger, a prominent lawyer's wife, turns up sprawled
across her desk.
V.I., who had volunteered with
Deirdre at a women's shelter, suspects her death is linked
to a case of upper-class domestic abuse so slickly concealed
that the police refuse to believe it. Increasingly at odds
with the cops, V.I. is blindly plunging ahead after the
truth. And her path may lead to corruption at the highest
levels.or deep into the abandoned tunnels beneath Chicago's
streets, where secrets are hiding in the dark like a
child's--or V.I.'s--worst nightmare.