As Van Dorn private detective Isaac Bell tries to land a government contract to investigate John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, the case takes a deadly turn. A sniper begins murdering opponents of Standard Oil, and soon the assassin kills Bell's best witness. Who is the assassin and for whom did he kill? Bell tracks his phantom-like adversary from the "oil fever" regions of Kansas and Texas to Washington, D.C., to the tycoons' enclave of New York, to Russia's war-torn Baku oil fields on the Caspian Sea, and back to America for one final, explosive confrontation"