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, Halβs 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 Hardyβs 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 Chasesβ marriage was fraught with problems; Halβs alibi is suspect; the life insurance policy on Katie was huge. But Glitskyβs mission is to identify other possible suspects, and there proves to be no shortage of them: Patti Oroscoβrich, beautiful, dangerous, and Halβs former lover; the still unknown person who had a recent affair with Katie; even Halβs own step-mother Ruth, resentful of Katieβs gatekeeping against her grandchildren. And as Glitsky probes further, he learns of an incident at the San Francisco jail, where Hal worksβonly one of many questionable inmate deaths that have taken place there. Then, when Katieβs 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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