When Alex Powell stops into a Los Angeles bookstore on a rainy spring night, she's planning to write a column on the author who is reading and signing books there. But what she gets instead is a firsthand look at the murder of a controversial African American writer. James Simpson Lee Hastings's death sends seismic shock waves through Los Angeles's black and white elite, and reveals how some of the city's well-to-do are connected in ways they'd rather leave unmentioned. But trying to unravel those connections might mean that the next time Alex's name shows up in her paper, it won't be as a byline, but in her own obituary.

Who killed Ev and why? The three most likely suspects are Ev's competitors -- publishers of the country's other popular black magazines who all had plenty of good reasons to make sure Ev never received his Journalist of the Year award.

With the help of Paul Butler, a fellow journalist and an old friend, Alex tries to untangle the circumstances that led to Ev Carson's death. Their investigative trail will carry them from the West Coast to the East, to D.C., New York, and the social whirl of Martha's Vineyard as the summer season reaches its peak. In the middle of dissed colleagues, dumped girlfriends, disgruntled ex-employees, and the legions of enemies Ev managed to accumulate before he died, Alex Powell realizes that before everything is over Everett Carson might not be the only person who ends up with a toe tag.