A second-generation homicide cop, ex-Major League baseball player, beleagured but loving father, heart-worn womanizer and renowned investigator, Seamus Moynihan figures after sixteen years on the job he’s already witnessed the worst kind of violence humans can visit upon another.Then he’s summoned to a crime scene where the victim, a naked man, has been tied to a bed then assaulted with North America’s deadliest pit viper: an eastern diamondback rattlesnake. Aided by a team of crack detectives, Moynihan enters a deadly world of twisted eroticism, hot herpetology, fanatical spiritual cults and ultimately the oldest mystery in the Bible, a riddle that has frustrated religious scholars for centuries: Who was the second woman, the enigmatic wife of Cain?