"Maureen Coughlin?s life isn?t turning out as planned. At twenty-nine, she?s stuck waiting tables in a Staten Island bar, and her only excitement comes from the next cigarette or a discreet dash of coke before her shift. But when a tryst between her coworker Dennis and an aspiring state senator named Frank Sebastian turns deadly, Maureen is jolted out of her routine. Soon she?s on the run through the borough?s seedy underbelly, desperate to stop Sebastian....

Maureen Coughlin starts out her career with the New Orleans police force by being punched in the face by a man rushing out of an apartment building.

"It's Mardi Gras in New Orleans and rookie cop Maureen Coughlin has no idea what she's in for. Her night working the parades begins calmly enough--until a half-naked man careens through the crowd and throws himself onto the hood of an oncoming SUV. As she tries to deal with the incident amid the pulsing chaos of the parade, Maureen hears gunshots. Moments later, with three wounded and a handful of drunken witnesses, Maureen has a full-fledged investigation...

"Maureen Coughlin is a bona fide New Orleans cop now, and, with her training days behind her, she likes to think she's getting the lay of the land. Then a mysterious corpse leads to more questions than answers, and a late-night traffic stop goes very wrong. The fallout leaves Maureen contending with troubled friends, fraying loyalties, cop-hating enemies old and new, and an elusive, spectral, and murderous new nemesis--and all the while navigating...