Reporter-turned-PI Tess Monaghan loves every inch of her native Baltimore—a quirky city where baseball reigns and homicide seems to be the second most popular sport. Business tycoon "Wink" Wynkowski wants to change all that by bringing pro basketball back to town—a laudable mission that's greeted with widespread cheers . . . until a muckraking front-page exposé of his past appears in the Beacon-Light. The Blight's surprised editors are sure they killed the piece. Instead, the piece kills Wynkowski, who's discovered asphyxiated in his garage with his car's engine running. Now the paper wants former newshound Tess to track down the rogue computer hacker whose prank took a human life. But there's more than cyber-crime involved here—and Tess is about to discover firsthand that trying to stay alive in Charm City is murder these days.