A distraught businessman who is looking for help walks into the office of a mouthy detective named Jules Bettinger, has a conversation, walks out, and kills himself. Because of this incident, the impolite but decorated policeman is forced to relocate himself and his family from their warm lives in Arizona to the frigid north and work for an understaffed precinct in Victory, Missouri. This collapsed rustbelt city is a dying beast that devours itself and gnaws at its inhabitants...and has done so for more than three decades. The streets are covered with dead pigeons and there are seven hundred criminals for every law enforcer. Partnered with a boorish and demoted corporal named Dominick Williams, Jules Bettinger investigates a double homicide in which two policemen were killed. Suspicious by nature and vocation, the detective looks for answers in the fringes of the city and in the pasts of the secretive men with whom he works--men who brutalized a local drug dealer until he was disabled. Jules Bettinger soon begins to suspect that the double homicide is not an isolated event, but part of a larger plot...a prelude to a series of cop executions