Las Vegas. The Babylon of twentieth-century America. A city on the edge of a desert, its inhabitants living on the edge of their nerves. Amongst them is Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe, assigned to the murder of a showgirl whose horrifically mauled body, Poe realises, has echoes of a twenty-five-year-old unsolved case.
But the half-forgotten past is soon swamped by present anxieties as Poe discovers that his colleague, Homicide Detective Steve Jensen, had an illicit relationship with the dead woman. And Poe's own relationship with Jensen's wife Alison is fraught with guilt: childhood playmate, teenage lover, adult friend and mainstay, Poe has never disentangled himself from the ties that Alison, afflicted with anorexia and a habitually unfaithful husband, exerts.
Then, as Poe watches Alison's tortured struggles with her body, he begins to wonder whether her obsessive research into what went on in the wastes of the Nevada desert three decades earlier might hold a key to the identity of the frighteningly animalistic murderer still at large . . .
