When the unidentified body of an elderly man is found in a wooded area of Los Angeles’s Rancho Park, it appears that he has succumbed to a heart attack. But homicide detective Jessie Drake suspects foul play. The victim, she discovers, was in vigorous health, made friends wherever he went, and was staying as a nonresident guest at an old age home. He was the only person in his family to come out of the concentration camps alive, with a scar on his forearm bearing chilling testimony to the tattooed numbers that once branded him. A man who survived the Holocaust may have lost his life to a murderer—a heart-wrenching irony to Jessie, who just recently learned of her own link to the historic atrocity.

In search of the mystery that brought the old man’s life to a lonely end, and driven by a personal mission on behalf of the family she never knew, Jessie combs the records of retirement homes and prods the failing memories of the residents. She discovers that the victim’s demise was just one of a number of mysterious deaths among camp survivors. Now she’s determined to follow a twisted trail of decades-old deceit to catch a killer—and spare the survivors of the death camps from the treachery of a modern-day maniac.