As a detective lieutenant with the LAPD, Peter Decker witnessed enough ugliness and chaos for a lifetime. Now, he and his wife Rena are ready to enjoy the quiet beauty of upstate New York, where they can be closer to their family.

But working for the Greenbury Police Department isn't as fulfilling as Decker hoped. Yet just when he thinks he's made a mistake, Decker is called to an actual crime—a possible break-in at the local cemetery.

At first, it seems like a false alarm but soon escalates into murder when a co-ed at an exclusive consortium of liberal-arts colleges is brutally slaughtered. Poking into the hallowed halls of academia to find a killer, Decker is drawn deep into a web of nasty secrets, cold-case crimes, international intrigue, and ruthless people who kill for sport.

Decker will need to use every bit of his keen mind and his thirty years of experience as a homicide cop to stop a callous killer and uncover a cabal so bizarre that it defies logic.