That soft, timid knock late at night. A hoarse mayday in the dark.

When you live in Marten's Marina, your doorstep is an international shipping lane. So when a half-drowned refugee washes ashore, Eva Fairchild-Malloy and her neighbors scramble to the rescue.

Their castaway is fleeing—from something almost too terrifying to put into words. But the Promised Land isn't really, not if she doesn't have the right paperwork and the right connections.

While Eva and her detective husband, Vaughn, are just beginning their married life together, they're also determined to help this desperate survivor hang on to her tenuous lifeline.

Can they untangle the web of nefarious fixers who work for other fixers—like an ugly, predatory food chain—before there's a break in the links that plunges everyone they love into danger?

Because this dark underbelly of society will kill to avoid being exposed.