PI Patrick Kenzie is hired to find a four-year-old girl, abducted while the mother was out drinking. The search takes Kenzie through Boston's underworld of drug dealers, kidnapers and pedophiles.

Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl, only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home. Now Amanda is sixteen and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing....

A ring of powerful Boston politicians is willing to pay private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro big money for a seemingly small job: to find a missing cleaning woman who stole some secret documents. As Kenzie and Gennaro learn, however, this crime is no ordinary theft. It's about justice, about right and wrong. But in Boston, finding the truth isn't just a dirty business ... it's deadly.