Gladys Sage escaped the backwoods of Northern Ontario, leaving behind the body of her stepfather, to arrive in New York and the world of political revolutionaries. Hired to find her is Pinkerton detective James Kelly, a recent Irish immigrant mainly interested in easy money, drink, and women. Going undercover among the radical followers of Emma Goldman, James' search for Gladdy becomes a passion that will affect the Kelly family for generations. Nawal Habib, James' granddaughter, has reinvented herself as a devout Muslim. Five times a day she prays toward Mecca, proving that she has left her early life as Janie Kelly, teenage runaway and outcast, behind. When her husband is killed and her son disappears in New York, suspected of involvement in a terrorist plot, everything she has built comes into question. She has no choice but to turn to the family she fled decades before. Nawal's search will lead to the secrets kept by her grandfather – a hidden family history that casts her son's radicalism in a new light, and begins with James Kelly's obsession with the mysterious Gladys Sage.