AustLit

'Chicago Detective Alicia Raymond, aka Berg, hides her depression and a brutal past with dangerous, anonymous sex and an obsessive desire to track down killers. Bringing murderers to justice is the only thing she has in her life worth living for. Her partner, Detective Inspector Jay O'Loughlin, has a few secrets of his own. He knows Berg isn't as perfect as her faultless veneer, but as his intense attraction to her grows, can he overlook it? Captain Louise Leigh assigns them to investigate the gruesome murder of a trucker and repeat sex offender. But before they can get a lead on the killing, another trucker's body is found on the highway. Soon the bodies pile up, and it's a race against time to find the killer before their Chief, Consiglio, uses them as scapegoats to fulfill his political aspirations. When Berg's DNA is found on one victim, her career looks to be over. In the course of clearing her name, she and Jay grow even closer, so when her sordid sex life is exposed, their precarious relationship comes under fire. With nothing to lose, Jay and Berg forge ahead and defy direct orders to continue working on the cases, until Jay disappears. Desperate to find him, Berg stops at nothing to unearth what links the murders together, eventually uncovering a sadistic vigilante exacting revenge for a thirty-year-old gang rape. The sheer viciousness of the rape makes Berg question her place in a justice system that increasingly allows the guilty to go unpunished. Berg fears for Jay's life, but her demons are overwhelming. As events spiral out of control, Berg is forced towards a final confrontation with the killer where she will face the ultimate test: surrender to the evil inside her or finally confront the past she would rather bury.' (Publication summary)