Tasia McFarland is a washed-up country-pop singer desperate for the
break that will get her topping the charts again. The tabloids have
raked over every part of Tasia's rocky life, following every high and
low--her addictions, her breakdowns, her increasingly erratic
behavior--and every broken relationship. The highlight of this lowlight
reel: Tasia McFarland is the ex-wife of the president of the United
States.
So when Tasia writes a song with politically charged lyrics, people take
note and her star begins to rise anew. In the opener of her comeback
tour, she is lowered into a stadium on a zip line, and as helicopters
fly overhead, she fires her prop Colt .45 at the fireworks-filled stage.
Tasia is riding high.
Until she's killed by a bullet to the neck before the shocked crowd of
forty thousand.
When video can't prove that the shot came from Tasia's own Colt .45, and
the ballistics report comes up empty, the authorities call on forensic
psychiatrist Jo Beckett to do a psychological autopsy and clean up the
potential political disaster. But as Jo sifts through the facts, she
only finds more questions: Was Tasia's gun loaded? Did she kill herself
in one last cry for attention? Were her politically charged lyrics the
rantings of a paranoid woman losing her grip, or warnings from a woman
afraid and in danger? For Jo, pouring over Tasia's past becomes a race
to extinguish the conspiracy rumor mill before it incites a level of
violence that reaches America's highest corridors of power--and tears
apart the very fabric of our nation.
