Thea Kozak is smart and funny, a very modern kind of woman who is carving out a career for herself while juggling all the stresses of a working woman's life. She works too hard. She's trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with Andre, the devilishly handsome Maine state trooper she met while trying to solve her sister's murder. She's trying to win her critical mother's approval. She's trying to find time to get to the gym. And things are about to get a lot more complicated. Home for Easter dinner, Thea's mother introduces her to Julie Bass, a sweet young widow whose husband died in a horrific accident at the local auto racetrack. Julie is the woman Thea's mother wants her to be—one who married a suitable man and produced adorable children. Thea's mother wants Thea to use her own experience of losing a husband to help Julie deal with widowhood. Thea is sympathetic, but she's also very busy. And she's reluctant to revive the pain that helping Julie will bring. But when the "accident" turns out to be murder and Julie is arrested, Thea is drawn into the search for the real killer. The search takes her from crooked rednecks to banking's back offices, through a maze of scary people and a web of lies and liars, until Thea must face the possibility that she not only may be unable to save Julie, she may not be able to save herself.