In an instant, the lives of two women collide. One was behind the wheels of a Trans Am she liked to drive too fast. The other was lying in the road, dying an agonizing death. When Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski gets out of her car to look at the woman she almost hit, she begins a long, harrowing descent into a world of shadowy secrets and tangled lives- and into the grimmest heart of her city. As Warshawski unravels the mystery of a battered and discarded woman, she moves through circles of the rich and the troubled, into the pampered world of a TV star, and behind the razor wire of a women' s prison. What V.I. finds is a web of conspiracy- and explosive secrets hidden in the darkest places of all.