Ever since the Brooklyn Blast in 2021, the human bedbugs and cockroaches of a traumatized society have crawled out of the woodwork. Cash-strapped and struggling with his own PTSD, New York investigator and exterminator-for-hire Keith Savage suddenly catches a case.

A beautiful LA journalist wants him to retrieve a younger sister who's vanished from their Long Island home. Runaway or kidnapped, there's a huge find-and-return fee to get Marielle back home before the weekend when her father, who's running for mayor, returns from a strategy retreat to launch his anti-corruption campaign.

But it's complicated. Marielle is paraplegic, a reclusive artist whose in-demand paintings feature insects. The housekeepers on whose watch she disappeared are an odd couple with a hidden agenda. Her only online friends are an astrologer and an angry young chess devotee, a paraplegic who recently underwent experimental limb replacement.

New York in 2026 is nasty and brutish. Between the toxic environment, turf wars between corrupt police and Russian mobsters, and a semi-deranged populace swinging from shakedown to breakdown, Savage is bitten and stung everywhere he turns. Within a day, he stirs up a wasp's nest of trouble. From poisonous jumping spiders to a swarm of giant Asian hornets, the trail of insects leads to a clinic where a radical entomologist is pushing the frontiers of science and ethics by using 3D printing to build human limbs with insect tissue.

Savage's mission: extract Marielle from the web that binds her before she submits to a metamorphosis of no return.