A reporter beaten to death.

A missing notebook.

An unending list of suspects.

Detective Maria Varela hated Les Hilton. He called himself a reporter, the last of the old school pavement pounders, more comfortable in a dive bar than posting to an app, but Maria knew he wasn't so much a reporter as a paid attack dog. Whenever the Vegas moneyed class wanted someone brought down a notch, Les was the guy who went digging for bones. Maria had been the target of one of those articles, written just carefully enough to avoid slander while doing damage just the same. Then someone tied Les to a chair and worked him over until even his ex-wife couldn't recognize him.

Tasked with finding his killer, Maria finds out that for all of Les's reputation as a mercenary, he still had some journalistic principles and was working on a story that threatened some of Las Vegas's most powerful people. At the heart of that story, Ariella Matos, a missing woman that no one seems to want found, not the FBI who have her father in witness protection, nor the leadership of the political campaign that she was working on. What starts as the brutal murder of someone who probably had it coming becomes a search for a woman who Maria quickly realizes is more complex than she appears.

In order to solve the case, Maria will have to find Ariella, but doing that might put everyone Maria loves in harm's way.