For a retired detective an unsolved case suddenly thrust in the present threatens to become the legacy of his career. For his daughter, Police Sergeant Mary Elizabeth Muldoon, the same case may be her last. An informer and recovering drug addict is found dead twenty years after the brutal slaying of a young man who moved in the same circles as the victim. Mary Elizabeth will begin to unravel long dormant clues that will awaken the histories of the dead but also the guilty who will go to any lengths to keep the case unsolved. As she and her partner are entangled to degrees that jeopardize their friendships, lives and careers, Mary Elizabeth struggles with her personal demons and public failings. And the bodies begin to pile up. Set in Lowell, Massachusetts, the city is a character by itself: shadowy and powerful, degraded and rehabilitated, a sort of cultural Phoenix with a past that represents all the greatness and grime of an immigrant city on the cusp of reinventing itself or continuing a sad decline, not unlike Mary Elizabeth herself.