Nika Voronina, a beautiful young Russian woman, comes to a wealthy suburb of New Orleans as the trophy wife of a coarse, alcoholic lottery multimillionaire, who is unaware that his lovely plaything is the victim of a terrible crime that devastated her psychologically. Her solitary struggle to rebuild her shattered psyche has produced a mask of normalcy concealing a deadly inner reality. The true female avenger is a subject Western literature has traditionally shied away from as too frighteningly alien to the character of woman as the sole source of human life. The ancient Greeks faced the reality unblinkingly in the bloody-handed likes of Medea, Clymenestra and Procne. Thereafter, however, vengeful women were largely reduced to convincing some man to do their killing for them. NIKA harks back to those ancient legends with a woman twisted by inner torment into a clever, relentless hunter of an entire class of evildoers. But Nika Voronina is not one of the one-dimensional female killing machines made popular by the comic book-level vigilante fiction of the past decade. Violent revenge comes at a very high emotional price to the avenger, particularly a female avenger, and Nika pays that price in full. In the sunny midst of an upper class American suburb, the darkness behind her beautiful face and form creates a perfect irony. She is a true monster, incurably flawed, outcast and profoundly tragic.