Sara Paretsky returns with the most extraordinary novel of her legendary career.

For the first time, Sara Paretsky takes her legendary hero--Victoria Iphigenia by birth, V. I. by profession, and Vic to her friends--on her very first case out of Chicago, when the hunt for a vanished film student and a faded Hollywood star leads her to Kansas. Accompanied by her dog, V. I. tracks the pair through a university town, across fields dotted with Cold War era missile silos ... and into a past riven by long-simmering racial tensions. She hopes her search will yield the key to the mysteries of the present, but every answer V.I. finds unveils another puzzling question--and leads to more dead bodies. And in her most far-reaching and disturbing case to date, not even the seasoned V. I. is safe.