Duck Darley should have been a winner. Once a competitive swimmer destined for Olympic gold, he drank away his gilded youth and followed his fraudster fatherβs footsteps into prison. Barely scraping by as an unlicensed private investigator, Duck now chases down cheating spouses for the same Manhattan elite who once viewed him as equal, and drowns bitter memories with whatever fills his glass.
Duckβs lost glory days resurface when heβs tasked with finding the teenaged sister of a former teammate turned Olympic champion. Privileged Madeline McKay vanished over Labor Day weekend, leaving behind a too-perfect West Village apartment and a promising athletic career of her own. Duck thinks heβs hunting for a self-destructive runawayβuntil Madelineβs film student ex is savagely murdered, and the media spins her as the psycho who killed him.
As Duck searches for Madeline, heβs plunged back into the dark underbelly of Olympic swimmingβa world rife with wild lies and terrible violence. And he soon learns that no matter how hard he tries to escape his past, demons still lurk beneath every surfaceβ¦