It's gray, gritty early spring in the midsize Mid-western city. Rusty Sabich, Kindle County's longtime chief deputy prosecutor, has been asked to investigate the rape and murder of one of his colleagues. Carolyn Polhernus was strong, sensuous, and magnetic; she was also clearly ambitious and quite possibly unscrupulous. Her murder has been an embarrassment to Rusty's boss, Raymond Horgan, who is facing a serious challenge in the upcoming election and who looks to Rusty for a fast solution to the case that will help save him politically. What Horgan doesn't know is that, only a few months before she was murdered, Carolyn Polhemus and Rusty Sabich were lovers. Rusty is a passionate, brooding, fundamentally lonely man. As he nears forty, both his marriage and his career seem to be stagnating. His feelings are focused on his love for his son, Nat, and his desperate, enduring fantasies about Carolyn, who had abruptly ended their affair six months ago. Rusty's investigation allows him to indulge relentlessly in his obsession, but he apparently makes little progress in finding the killer. Then, when Horgan loses the election, Rusty suddenly, incredibly, finds himself accused of Carolyn's murder.