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A.J. Ash had a lot of advantages: wealth, beauty, and a commitment to help some of society’s most vulnerable and damaged souls. So why did her body wash up on a Lake Michigan breakwater in the shadow of the Magnificent Mile? The evidence points police to a drunken accident at best, or a suicide at worst. But socialite Jane Ash refuses to believe that her daughter threw her life away—not after overcoming the demons and pain of an adolescence ravaged by infidelity, divorce and ugly battles over money. Jane Ash hires ex-FBI agent Augustine Flood to find out what really happened. The clues lead him into the darkest heart of Chicago, a world of fast money, depravity and violence, where pimps peddle homeless children while society looks the other way. As he peels back the layers of A.J.’s final weeks, Flood learns that a missing teenage prostitute may have the answers to what really happened. Following her trail to the Mississippi Delta, the seediest corners of Las Vegas’s skin trade and ultimately into a violent gang war on Chicago’s West Side, Flood sets in motion a final confrontation with murder and a darkness he could scarcely have imagined. |