Journalist Geri LaRue is outraged when she loses the paper's "Off the Record" column to an insufferable colleague. To salvage her career and her waning self- confidence, Geri needs a break—and fast. The perfect story comes when successful businesswoman Kathleen Fowler is found dead—her battered body dropped from the balcony of her home to the cliffs below. But Geri doesn't have to chase this story; she inherits it. Somehow she has been named the murdered woman's sole beneficiary, despite never having met her.

As Geri sets out to discover why the estate has been left to her, everything leads back to her own troubled childhood. A childhood she would rather forget—the foster homes, the painful memories. And when another person is brutally murdered, Geri realizes that the key to finding a killer may be hidden in her own mind.