The economy has hit the private-investigator business hard, even for Leonid McGill. Lately, he is getting job offers only from the criminals he's worked so hard to leave behind. Meanwhile, his personal life grows ever more complicated: his favorite stepson, Twill, drops out of school for mysteriously lucrative pursuits; his best friend, Gordo, has been diagnosed with cancer and is living on his couch; his wife has taken a new lover, and seems to be endangering the McGill family; and his girlfriend, Aura, is back in his life but intent on some serious conversations So how can McGill say no to the beautiful young woman who walks into his office with a stack of cash? She's an artist, she says, who escaped from poverty via a marriage to a rich art collector who keeps her on a stipend. But she tells McGill that she fears for her life, and that she needs his help to make sure she doesn’t meet the fate of her husband’s first two wives. McGill knows better than to believe every word a potential client says, but this isn't a job he can afford to turn away, even as he senses that—if his family's misadventures don't kill him first—sorting out the truth in her story will propel him to confront some surprising, even shocking, truths. As he did in his first two Leonid McGill mysteries, the bestselling The Long Fall and Known to Evil, Walter Mosley creates the vivid and engrossing world of a New York where motives are always suspect and nothing is as it seems.