It's summertime in the nation's capital, and everyone seems to have fled the capital and its suburbs to escape the heat. Washington News reporter Sutton McPhee is struggling to find a decent story on her Fairfax County police beat. Even Sutton isn't prepared, however, when the young police officer who took her on a less-than-exciting ride-along is found shot to death in his apartment. The subsequent discovery of a body in a public park, where they had responded to a public drunkenness call, sets off Sutton's alarms and sends her looking for connections between the two murders.
 
Her search for answers will take her from the corridors of power in Washington to her long-ago life as a reporter and wife in Florida. It also puts Sutton in the killer's crosshairs – someplace she has been before – but this time she isn't there alone. This time police detective Noah Lansing, her new romantic interest, is targeted right along with her, and it's up to Sutton to see to it that his 5-year-old son doesn't become an orphan.