"The law is anything you make it up to be. There's no math involved." -Nicholas Winterstein, defense attorney in the racially charged city of Detroit. Judge Goodwin Marshall goes from poverty to the bench, to the inner circles of the civil-rights movement, and the NAACP. Winterstein is drawn into the affairs of Goodwin Marshall when the judge is indicted for insider trading. But securities law is not Winterstein's area. Why come to him? And how do Jessup Carthage, famed civil-rights leader, Huey Newton (the Black Panther Party), and the Nation of Islam fit into the case? As crime, murder, and corruption are revealed throughout the present culture of the civil-rights movement, Winterstein is drawn back to the very house where he was born and raised-to an inescapable past.