A top Senate aide has turned up dead from a drug overdose, her nude body found wrapped in a sheet in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. It doesn't require the reporting acumen of Washington News reporter Sutton McPhee to figure out someone else was involved. But Sutton – who now covers the Fairfax County police, after having risked her own life to solve her sister's murder – is all over it because she knows this new case has all the signs of a Washington scandal in the making.
Even as Sutton works her sources, follows her reporter's instincts, and clashes with a new detective assigned to the case, police are called to the scene of another high-profile death: the murder of the wheelchair-bound wife of a Fairfax County Supervisor. It isn't long before Sutton's instincts tell her the two cases are somehow related – and Sutton won't stop until she knows exactly what that connection is. But even Sutton is shocked as she begins to learn just how high and how far the connections go, and just how much power can corrupt.