Kinsey Millhone is finally settling back into her beautiful new, refurbished apartment after it was previously destroyed in a bomb when a pair of mysteries pulls her into a whirlwind of trouble.

The first is one that she really has no choice in. It seems that one of her old cases is coming back to bite her. Tyrone Patty was someone she helped bring to justice, and he has decided to get revenge on everyone who helped bringing him down (Kinsey, the judge, the prosecutor....) by getting contracts out on them.

The case she has officially taken on is a mystery that will take a lot to sort out. At first, she is just hired by Irene Gersh to find her mother Agnes. Agnes, who is an older woman living in the deserts nearby has disappeared and her home has been taken over by a pair of teen squatters. Kinsey goes out into the desert in the hopes of finding the woman, which she does fairly quickly. The case doesn't end there, though, as she learns that there is more to Agnes' disappearance, and her past, than meets the eye.

It is going to be up to Kinsey to get to the root of the problem while fending off multiple attempts on her life by the guy hired to kill her, who seems just as interested in scaring her to death as just ending it quickly for the money.

You would think that with so much going on, this book would be hard to follow, but it isn't. It moves along very quickly as Kinsey and her bodyguard Deitz work together to both keep her alive and sort out Agnes' mysterious past. It was a quick read for me because I really did not want to put it aside.