Stubbornness has landed private eye V.I. Warshawski in big trouble at
her Chicago office. With her grand old Loop building set to be razed,
she's become a hold-out tenant amid frayed wiring and scary, empty
corridors. Then she finds a homeless woman with three kids in the
basement, and before she can rescue them, they disappear. Worst of all,
she's been implicated in a murder--after the body of Deirdre Messenger,
a prominent lawyer's wife, turns up sprawled across her desk.
V.I., who had volunteered with Deirdre at a women's shelter, suspects
her death is linked to a case of upper-class domestic abuse so slickly
concealed that the police refuse to believe it. Increasingly at odds
with the cops, V.I. is blindly plunging ahead after the truth. And her
path may lead to corruption at the highest levels or deep into the
abandoned tunnels beneath Chicago's streets, where secrets are hiding in
the dark like a child's--or V.I.'s--worst nightmare.