A PHOENIX COLD CASE: David Mapstone has returned to Phoenix, Arizona, the desert city he left behind a lifetime ago. The ex-cop, ex-history professor is working the police dept's cold case desk, unearthing long-buried secrets. And he's good at it: as an ex-historian Mapstone knows the past is never past, as an ex-cop he knows he can't trust anybody...

Half a century after the unsolved murder of an FBI agent, the victim's missing badge is found sewn inside the jacket of a dead transient. Forced into partnership with a rival cold-case expert and stonewalled by the FBI about the details of the case, David Mapstone's problems have just begun: following the bust of a major international crime syndicate, the Russian mafiya are also after his blood.

Following the trail through the most forlorn parts of Phoenix and the desolate south Arizonan desert, Mapstone's got the brains, he's got the leads, but if he wants to bring justice to a fifty-year-old crime, he's going to have to stay alive long enough to do it.