Two years have passed since the events in Dust. Evan Reed is still cranky, but she's also dealing with the nagging effects of a gunshot wound. Her teenage daughter, Stevie is looking at prospective colleges, and Stevie's father, Dan, has married a woman half his age. Evan's childhood pal, Father Tim, is questioning is faith, and Evan's relationship with publishing magnate, Julia Donne has all the earmarks of heading . . . somewhere.

But all of that changes in a hurry when Evan is hired by the DNC to do opposition research on the president's controversial nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. For starters, she has to work at light speed because the senate is fast-tracking the nomination--and the judge, who is a darling of the far right, is an avowed constructionist with a paper trail nine miles long. The job gets murkier when Evan discovers a link between the nominee and a now half-crazed, disgraced former U.S. senator who Evan was hired to vet many years ago. The stigma of that episode led Evan to vow never to work for political kingmaker, Marcus Goldman, again.

Things take a dangerous and eerily personal turn when Evan's descent into the fetid subterranean world of vested interests, dark money PACs, and barbaric private rituals explodes everything she thought she knew about her best friend, Father Tim, her own conflicted religious beliefs, and any shot at a happy future with the patrician Julia. To make matters worse, Evan's personal Moriarty, Maya Jindal, reappears--up to her shapely eyebrows in the middle of an expanding web of lies, secrets and betrayals that shrouds everything in Evan's life with hopelessness and uncertainty.