'It was the stunned, pale look of bad news'The call is brief. There's been a murder in the family of Lieutenant Decker's half brother, Rabbi Jonathan Levine. Ephraim Lieber, a Hassidic Jew with a catalogue of problems in his past, was found dead in a seedy Manhattan hotel, a single gunshot wound to his head. And his niece, fifteen-year-old Shaynda, is missing.

In a desperate bid to track down the missing girl, Decker finds himself in an alien city and a maze of deceit and danger, on a twisted journey that takes him from the darkened slums of New Jersey and the deserted industrial streets of New York, to the hidden meeting places of Hassidic outcasts...