Private investigator Ronnie Ventana is sitting alone on a bench in the middle of the night, at the San Francisco intersection of Sunset and Santiago. she is there to observe the grim anniversary of her parents' fatal car crash twenty years earlier--an "accident" that has never seemed entirely accidental to her. But then, there in the darkness, she notices two men dumping a body in the shrubs. and a young witness, who's also a friend, wants to get involved in solving the case, What had started as a midnight vigil--personal and poignant--turns into a public investigation of a very different crime, Now, without warning, Ronnie is up to her ears in a new case that snakes through a tunnel of civic corruption and brings her fresh revelations about her parents' long-ago double murder.