Slate, a recovering lawyer who lost his family to an accident, lives on a sailboat, owns a beach bar, and occasionally helps clients recover things they have lost. Children, for example. Kris Kramer, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Birmingham lawyer, Don Kramer, has been missing for two days when her father visits Slate in his beach bar, which isn't very busy on a raw day in January. Kramer engages Slate to try to find Kris. But two days after Slate arrives in Birmingham, Leon Grubbs, captain of the Homicide Division of the Birmingham Police Department, calls Slate just after midnight. A murder victim lies across the railroad tracks in the no-man's-land between North and South Birmingham, Slate's business card in his pocket. Fans of John D. MacDonald and Robert Parker will find themselves on familiar ground in this first novel of a series.