Finding a corpse in the trunk of your cab is a rotten way to start the day. For Bo Forrester, things go straight downhill from there. The cops are asking an awful lot of questions. The murder weapon turns up too close for comfort. And the attractive woman giving him the eye turns out to be Trudy Hauser, a cute-but-crazy deputy dead set on arresting him for murder.

Bo returned to Rhodes, an upstate New York college town, hoping to reconcile with his parents, gentle hippies who couldn’t accept his decision to join the Army at eighteen. Twenty years later, the commune where he grew up is a subdivision, and his parents are long gone. Pondering his next move, Bo takes a job driving a cab. And he has no clue how the bullet-riddled body of art philanthropist Fred Davies ended up in the trunk.

Now, he can’t turn around without bumping into Trudy—it’s not her case, but that’s not slowing her down. The local cops, suspecting robbery as the motive, are right behind her. When Davies’s beautiful widow asks Bo for help, he can’t say no. Starting his own investigation, he’s plunged into a world of privilege, corruption, and high-stakes greed. A lot of people had reason to want Davies dead: a flirtatious art history professor with a taste for booze and men; her insanely jealous, ex-felon husband; the business partner with a secret addiction; and an avant-garde artist who proclaims that murder is the ultimate art form.

As the body count escalates, Bo must combine the skills he learned as a soldier with the values he grew up with on the commune to flush out a vicious murderer—if he manages to stay alive that long.