When Dave Gurney, retired NYPD homicide detective, is contacted by an old college acquaintance about some startling letters he's been receiving, it is at first little more than a diverting but sinister puzzle. Then the acquaitance is killed. Gurney finds himself in the midst of a murder investigation that makes no sense.
Representing the system's most unsavory characters in his work as a criminal defense lawyer, jaded attorney Mickey Haller takes on his first high-paying and possibly innocent client in years, but finds the case complicated by sinister events that suggest the workings of a particularly evil perpetrator.
"Blood Work" -- that's what Terrell McCaleb used to call his job at the FBI. Until a heart condition forced him to take early retirement, he headed all investigations of serial murders in the Los Angeles area. Now he is recovering from a heart transplant operation and leads a quiet life. But McCaleb's calm seas turn rough when a story in the "L.A. Times" brings him face-to-face with Graciela Rivers, a darkly intriguing woman who hooks him with the story of her sister's unsolved murder. Against doctor's orders and his own better judgement, McCaleb agrees to take up the case. Soon Terry is on the trail of a killer whose crimes are more baffling and horrifying than anything he has ever encountered. It's a mind-bending, breakneck case that leads McCaleb into the darkest place he's ever known, unsure whether he even wants to survive his own investigation.