The heat is killer in Cochise County, Arizona and in the suffocating stillness of an airless trailer, a woman is lying dead, a bullet hole in her chest. Who would murder a harmless loner and why did the killer use an eighty-five-year-old bullet, fired from the same weapon that slaughtered two other women?

The slayings are as oppressive as the blistering heat for Sheriff Joanna Brady, who must shoulder the double burden of a brutal reelection campaign and major developments on the home front. Joanna must now deal with the terrifying reality that now threatens everyone in her jurisdiction: a serial killer is in their midst.

As personal and professional pressure mounts, Sheriff Brady must pursue a sadistic murderer into the shadows of the past to get to the roots of a monstrous obsession...and expose the permanent wounds of a crime far worse than homicide.