Private investigator Cate Harlow finds herself involved in two cases that seemingly have nothing to do with each other; she soon discovers they may be bizarrely connected. While working the cold case of a boy who went missing ten years ago, she receives an early morning call from her ex-husband, a homicide detective, informing her about a recent murder; the horribly mutilated body of a priest, wearing only a clerical collar has just been found off of Interstate 95 in New York. The murder is eerily similar to a troublesome and unsolved case that Cate worked on less than a year ago. The only difference between the two victims is that the second dead body has a hand-written message in Latin scrawled across the inside of the priestly collar; a message from Dante's Divine Comedy, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." With the priests' murders heavily on her mind, Cate's investigation into the missing boy leads her to the august office of a New Jersey archbishop who, she strongly believes, has been hiding pedophile priests for years by transferring them from one parish to another. When Cate discovers that there may be a solid connection between the priest murders and the missing person cold case, she puts her own life on the line to not only solve her cold case but bring a pedophile to justice.