Patti Black is the most decorated cop in Chicago; a ghetto street officer, she redefines the word badass. But the steel-plated exterior she shows to the world - solitary, friendless, loveless - hides the hideous traumas of her past. As an orphaned child, she was horribly sexually abused by her foster parents, and the torments of the past are only barely contained by her meticulously maintained tough-guy persona.

When a serious of seemingly unrelated cases - a drug bust gone bad, a mayoral assassination attempt, the abduction and murder of a state attorney, a long-hidden body walled up in a tenement basement - all point in her direction, she comes to the horrified realization that her past is no longer staying in its deeply suppressed place. It's back and hunting her down...