Nashville PI Jackson Gamble is hired by the wife of a small-college professor who has been missing for four years. Gamble is skeptical that he can do much to find him after so much time has gone by. But then the case becomes even more complicated when his client turns up dead from a fatal injection of insulin. But who killed her, and does her death have anything to do with her husband’s disappearance? Peeling the skin off secrets one by one, Gamble discovers the place where small-time criminals, academic life, lost husbands, organized crime and, sadly, the death of innocents all meet.