The aging riverboat casinos and decrepit cut-rate hotels that line the dark waters running through downtown Booth City reveal the seething underbelly of a Midwestern city down on its luck. Booth is filled with a collection of lonely souls looking for one last shot at happiness in what seems the most unlikely place on earth. Instead they're trapped in a never-ending cycle of false hope and true despair, temporary sobriety and permanent desolation.

Two of these souls, homicide cops Eliza Ochoa and Ike Horner, are on the scene of a body dump in a downtown park, crouching over the freezing corpse of another dead working girl. She's been cut up in all the most delicate places, and so it's perhaps understandable that Ike and Eliza at first miss the most telling part of this routine Booth City morning: she isn't actually female.

As the two detectives go over the last days of a young prostitute's life, pushed more by dogged determination than any super sleuthing powers, the facts lead them deep into a quickly unraveling conspiracy that stretches from the darkest holes in Booth to the fringes of its most influential families. As the investigation hurtles toward its violent and startling conclusion, Ike and Eliza remain intent on proving, perhaps only to themselves and at great personal cost, that justice is indeed possible in Booth City.