At the close of a long day, Inspector Stephen Villani stands in the bathroom of a luxury apartment high above the city. In the glass bath, a young woman lies dead.

Villani's job as the head of the Victoria Police Homicide Squad is bathed in blood and sorrow. Incapable of constancy as a father and husband, damaged as a son, his life is his work. Now, over a few sweltering summer days, as fires burn across the state and his superiors and colleagues scheme and jostle, the girl's murder will collide with what seems on the surface to be another brutal gangland slaying and expose the darkness in the city's soul.