On the evening before Thanksgiving, Hal Chase, a guard in
the San Francisco County Jail, drives to the airport to pick
up his step-brother for the weekend. When they return, Hal’s
wife, Katie, has disappeared without a clue.
By the time Dismas Hardy hears about this, Katie has been
missing for five days. The case strikes close to home
because Katie had been seeing Hardy’s wife, a marriage
counselor. By this time, the original Missing Persons case
has become a suspected homicide, and Hal is the prime
suspect. And the lawyer he wants for his defense is none
other than Hardy himself.
Hardy calls on his friend, former homicide detective Abe
Glitsky, to look into the case. At first it seems like the
police might have it right; the Chases’ marriage was fraught
with problems; Hal’s alibi is suspect; the life insurance
policy on Katie was huge. But Glitsky’s mission is to
identify other possible suspects, and there proves to be no
shortage of them: Patti Orosco—rich, beautiful, dangerous,
and Hal’s former lover; the still unknown person who had a
recent affair with Katie; even Hal’s own step-mother Ruth,
resentful of Katie’s gatekeeping against her grandchildren.
And as Glitsky probes further, he learns of an incident at
the San Francisco jail, where Hal works—only one of many
questionable inmate deaths that have taken place there.
Then, when Katie’s body is found not three blocks from the
Chase home, Homicide arrests Hal and he finds himself an
inmate in the very jail where he used to work, a place full
of secrets he knows all too well.
Against this backdrop of conspiracy and corruption,
ambiguous motives and suspicious alibis, an obsessed Glitsky
closes in on the elusive truth. As other deaths begin to
pile up he realizes, perhaps too late, that the next victim
might be himself.
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