Vicki Cole is, at the age of 37, one of the more enviable women in America. Beautiful, intelligent, and obscenely wealthy, she inherited her fortune and her position as the Chief Executive Officer of Consolidated Defense Industries from her grandfather, Henry Cole, who founded the company as a closely held, family run operation and built it into a behemoth of the military industrial complex. In selecting Vicki as his successor, he bypassed his son, Winston Cole, Vicki's widowed father.

It is early on New Year's morning, January 1, 2023. Vicki has hosted a lavish party for the top executives of the company, which has just concluded one of its more eventful years. The guests have left and Vicki is staring at the recessed ceiling of her mini-mansion overlooking the Potomac River outside Washington, D.C. But those green eyes that stirred so many male hearts are vacant and still.

Vicki Cole—beautiful, successful, and wealthy—is dead.

Having set the stage in this way, the story leaps back to the previous New Year's Day, January 1, 2022. It is then that we begin to meet a cast of characters whose paths and fates will intersect in the year leading up to Vicki's death and in the period thereafter, as the authorities try to resolve the "Who?" and "Why?" of her demise.