...her neighbors, her teenaged friend Graciela, the doctor at the fertility clinic where she had worked. Everybody but the person who beat and strangled her and tossed her body off the ocean bluff like so much garbage.

Port Silva chief Vince Gutierrez, struggling to keep his rain-weary and economically depressed town from crumbing into chaos, at first suspects Espy's death is another in a recent string of domestic crimes, and sets up a search for her missing husband and children. Then Graciela, sixteen years old and pregnant, disappears...