Sometimes a case is so intimate, so much a part of you, it follows you, seeks you out, beckons to you, then it draws you away into its own world. "He called them his Forces of Discontent, all those sources of fragmented violence waiting to be harnessed... The dissidents, the abused, the abandoned, and the disgruntled." All he lacked was a day of reckoning, and now he had it. Like a gift from the gods of anarchy, a vow of blood vengeance against the government opens a pathway to the destruction of the American heartland. To thwart it, Detective Syd Brogan must abandon the world of civil laws and let herself be drawn into a remote enclave where repression is law and vengeance is justice. It's a desperate measure for a desperate time. So, too, are its desperate consequences.