The call comes in on a Friday afternoon, a bizarre double murder in Galveston, in a multimillion-dollar beach house. Local police hold the scene, moving nothing, until Texas Ranger Sarah Armstrong arrives. Even crime photos won't do these bloody murders justice. They're like nothing Armstrong has ever encountered as the Ranger's lone criminal profiler.

Thus begins a whirlwind investigation into a string of murders that propels Armstrong across Texas, from a Fort Worth mansion to Texas' Rio Grande Valley, from a San Antonio barrio to the piney woods of the Big Thicket, and into the epicenter of Houston high society. Still reeling from a loss that fractured her family, Sarah Armstrong soon finds her world spinning out of control and everything she holds dear threatened, even her very life.