Las Vegas. The Gomorrah of twentieth-century America. A city on the edge of a desert, its inhabitants living on the edge of their nerves. Amongst them is Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe, assigned to the murder of a showgirl whose mauled body, Poe realises, has echoes of a twenty-five-year-old unsolved case.

But when Poe discovers his colleague, Steve Jensen, had a relationship with the murdered woman, the anxieties of the presnt soon overshadow the half-forgotten past...