"The scene in the West Village studio appears to be classic crime-of-passion: two wineglasses by the bed, music playing, and a young sculptor named Ariel Byrd with the back of her head bashed in. But when Dallas tracks down the wealthy Upper East Side woman who called 911, the details don't add up. Gwen Huffman is wealthy, elegant, comforted by her handsome fiancé as she sheds tears over the trauma of finding the body--but why did it take an hour...

Historian Lucas Page visits St. Louis to give a reading. Among the attendees is someone he does not expect: Lola Faye Gilroy, the "other woman" he has long blamed for his father's murder decades earlier. Now he must discover why Lola Faye has come and what she is after--before it is too late.