A kid from Miami's meanest streets, Theo Knight lost his mother to a violent crime. He was on Death Row for a murder he didn't commit when lawyer Jack Swyteck proved him innocent. Now they are best friends. Theo is a semi-respectable and successful bar owner, but yesterday, with its risks and its terrors, has come knocking on his back door. An escaped convict from the old neighborhood wants sanctuary, and, in return, he is offering information: the identity of the killer who left Theo's mom lying dead in the street on a hot South Florida evening.

Theo wants justice, but the answers are not simple. He and Jack must now piece together a twenty-year-old conspiracy of greed and corruption that's pointing them toward the city's most elite and powerful. And digging through a past that Theo has struggled his whole life to forget could awaken some very desperate, very deadly sleeping dogs.