Victoria Iphigenia by birth, V. I. by profession, and Vic to her friends—on her very first case out of Chicago, when the hunt for a vanished film student and a faded Hollywood star leads her to Kansas. Accompanied by her dog, V. I. tracks the pair through a university town, across fields dotted with Cold War era missile silos...and into a past riven by long-simmering racial tensions. She hopes her search will yield the key to the mysteries of the present, but every answer V.I. finds unveils another puzzling question—and leads to more dead bodies. And in her most far-reaching and disturbing case to date, not even the seasoned V. I. is safe.