Stephanie Plum is is a failed lingerie buyer, newly turned bond agent. Her first job is to find Morrelli, a policeman/murder suspect on the run and her childhood sweetheart. Real menace enters the story when Stephanie attracts the psychopathic attentions of boxer Benito Ramirez.
Adam Chase has spent the last five years in New York trying to wipe out the memory of his family's rejection. Until a phone call from his best friend Summons him back to Red Water Farm. When he left North Carolina, Adam left for good. Now he has no choice but to return - and being remembered as a murderer doesn't help. Within hours of arriving, Adam is beaten up, accosted and has to face the hostility of those closest to him, including Grace, the young woman he cannot forget. Nothing has changed. And then people start turning up dead. For a man only just acquitted of murder, Adam's homecoming does not go well. And he has a dark streaks, a history of violence. Everyone doubts. No one trusts him. And as the past threatnes to overshadow the present, Adam becomes the prime suspect for the new murders. He alone can clear his name.
Christmas Eve in Boston is no holy night for medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles. In a rundown house a woman has been dismembered in an act of carnage that leaves veteran cops in shock. The last person called from the dead girl's phone is Dr. Joyce O'Donnell, a celebrity psychiatrist who's made her name defending serial murderers. But there are other clues that make the police wonder if this slaying was part of a Satanic ritual. Drawn on the wall, in blood, are ancient symbols, and a mirror-image word in Latin that, translated, says: "I have sinned." Then a second woman is found butchered on Beacon Hill, just outside the grand residence of Anthony Sansone, a reclusive historian. He is the leader of the Mephisto Club, an old and secret society dedicated to the study of evil, and to confronting it in its purest form. On the door to Sansone's house have been scrawled yet more ancient symbols. Are they clues? Or threats? When the same symbols appear on Maura Isles' door, Maura and Jane must call on the Mephisto Club for assistance. Because this is a form of evil Boston PD has never encountered before. And the only way they can defeat it is by turning to the people who understand the devil himself.
Young lawyer Mary DiNunzio finds her life in jeopardy when she digs too closely into the suicide of an Italian-American in a World War II internment camp, and starts receiving ominous threats.