Dakota Reyes, a twenty-something private eye who specializes in what she calls ‘hard-to-prosecute’ cases, finds herself in a dark alley one night, about to end up dead at the hands of a young Ted Bundy in training...that is, until a lost, shape-shifting alien named Nihkil rescues her, and inadvertently takes her home with him. The problem is, his home is in a different dimension, and Dakota has no clue how to get back to Seattle, or Earth, or even her own time period. She finds herself bound to her rescuer, Nihkil, through his ‘lock,’ a quasi-biological structure that controls whether he can shape-shift, among other things, which he needs to be able to do in order to get her back home. Only Dakota has no idea how to open Nik’s lock, and the longer she spends in his world, the more forces begin to align against them, trying to prevent her from getting home.

“I was going to find that damned kid, Jazzy Jiāng, if it killed me.…” Dakota Reyes, twenty-something private eye, finally made it back to Earth and back to Seattle, after dropping through a dimensional portal one very bad night, nine months earlier. She didn’t come back alone: a shape-shifting alien named Nihkil, her lock-mate and friend from that other world, came with her. …So did a bunch of other shape-shifting aliens, anti-human terrorists trying to escape their human enslavers in that other world. But that last part was an accident. Sort of. Now Dakota and Nik are hiding out with Dakota’s friends, Irene and Gantry, and Dakota’s con artist brother, Jake. The psychopath who nearly killed her on her last job is still hanging around, too, looking for revenge. Dakota’s also got a new job, looking for missing girls kidnapped by human traffickers, and her pal, Gantry, tells her there’s a contract out on her, one with probable ties back to the government. Oh, and the leader of the terrorist aliens, Razmun, is trying to get Dakota thrown in jail so he can kidnap Nihkil. Worse, all of these things seem strangely connected. Then there’s Nik himself. Sometimes, Dakota would prefer if she could just keep her hot, shape-shifting pal at a distance, but despite Gantry’s warnings and Nik’s own “issues,” she’s finding that increasingly impossible to do.