Shortly after his 15th birthday, young miscreant Nicky Snape is found dead from hanging in the juvenile detention home where he is being held. Usually a petty thief, it seems that this time Nicky had gotten in way over his head.

The author of two bestselling mystery series (the Joanna Brady and J.P. Beaumont series) introduces a new heroine, whose attempt at a fresh start in life could end quite abruptly and unpleasantly. When 45-year-old Los Angeles TV news anchor Alison Reynolds's life implodes--both her employer and her husband replace her with a younger woman--she decides to go home and take stock in Sedona, Arizona, where her parents run a diner. There, she initiates two new and unexpectedly hazardous ventures: investigating the disappearance of her friend Reenie, recently diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, and starting a new blog.

Thirty years ago, Richard Green, a leader of the Weather Underground, faked his death during an explosion. Now, he calls himself Warren Ritter and works as a street-corner Tarot reader in Berkeley. While Ritter generally doesn't take much stock in his own predictions, he finds teenager Heather Wellington's reading unusually disturbing--it strongly suggests that she's about to be restrained or tied down in the near future. When she's kidnapped the next day and her mother murdered one week later, Ritter feels as if he's implicated in the crimes...and so do the police and the FBI. Can he discover what happened to Heather while continuing to hide his true identity from the authorities? This debut mystery, the first in a projected series, made its author David Skibbins the first man to win the St. Martin's Minotaur /Malice Domestic contest for Best First Traditional Mystery.