Will Lee, who fans will remember from earlier Woods novels, is now chief aide to Washington's most powerful senator, Benjamin Carr, and is one of the United States Senate's most respected staffers. Talented, experienced and honorable, he is well settled in his personal life, as well—son of a prominent southern political family and his father's law partner, personally wealthy and secretly engaged to a brilliant woman, Katharine Rule who is a senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Then Will's world spins off into an unpredictable orbit. Within the space of a few days, he becomes involved in the trial of a young man for a brutal, race related rape and murder; embroiled in a political race for which he is unprepared; estranged from the woman he loves; and, unknown to him, the object of unwanted attention from a shadowy and violent white-supremacist organization, The Elect.

Will is inexorably drawn into a sensational and vicious political brawl that kindles fires of racial hatred and moral outrage, balancing him precariously between national celebrity and career ending notoriety. Finally, his hidden affair with a dangerously beautiful young woman threatens to edge him into a yawning abyss of political oblivion, financial ruin and personal destruction.  less