'It was the stunned, pale look of bad news' Immediately Lieutenant Peter Decker of the LA police thinks of his elderly parents. Rina, his wife, reassures him the family's fine, but the call was from Rabbi Jonathan Levine, Decker's recently discovered half brother. There has been a murder in Jonathan's family; his brother-in-law, a Hassidic Jew and former drug addict, was found naked in a seedy Manhattan hotel, a single gunshot wound to his head. And his niece, fifteen-year-old Shaynda, is missing... Called on to help his new-found relatives through this terrifying time of looking and waiting, Decker journeys to New York, his eight-year-old daughter Hannah in tow. 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...