Olga Evorova has dropped in to Cuddy's Boston Commons office without an appointment. She drives a custom-painted Porsche 911 Carrera six-speed; she has a high-paying position at a Boston bank. And she has a boyfriend she wants to marry. . . except she doesn't know who he really is. Ms. Evorova needs a discreet, confidential background check on the man she knows as Andrew Dees. It seems like a routine case to Cuddy, and that suits him just fine. He wants to concentrate on Assistant D. A. Nancy Meagher; their relationship is taking a quantum leap into something that feels a lot like forever. Cuddy's life, like the golden early autumn days, feels mellow, warm, and promising. He doesn't know it is about to go to hell in a very shaky handbasket. The downward slide starts when Cuddy drives to Cape Cod to find Dees's condo in a seedy town called Plymouth Mills. As Cuddy begins questioning the condo's manager and Dees's neighbors, his instincts begin to signal that something is very wrong. Nothing in his conversations with a housebound alcoholic photographer, a hostile Jamaican-born housewife with a teenage son, and a sweet-as-syrup thirtysomething Yuppie wife seems out of the ordinary. But Cuddy feels they are all lying. When two mob thugs catch him in a Boston parking lot later that night and warn him to stay away from the condo, Cuddy guesses he has stepped into it deep. . . Is Andrew Dees connected? The one person Cuddy can count on for information is his old friend Primo Zuppone. The knowledge Cuddy is about to receive will not fit the old adage "knowledge is power". It fits a shamus's old lament: "knowledge is trouble". Then, in the midst of a puzzle that has begun to resemble a Russianmatryoshka doll - the kind that contains dolls within dolls - he makes one of the worst discoveries of his life. It's about Nancy, and it's the beginning of a nightmare Cuddy thought he would never face again. With his personal life in turmoil and the investigation of Andrew Dees turning even more bizarre and dangerous, Cuddy is looking into the darkest shadows of people's lives, where they hide their secrets, their sins, their acts of love - and their dirty deeds. Like murder.
