Detective Karen Skaryd has twenty-five years on the job and twenty-five years of marriage, and she is spending the anniversary of the second one at a resort in Punta Cana with her husband Brock.

Then a guest turns up dead, and the scene has been arranged. A verse from scripture. Something taken from the body and kept. By the time the local police have finished dismissing it, there is a second one.

A former FBI agent on a beach with no badge and no jurisdiction, Karen is the only person on the island reading the pattern for what it is: someone is working through the Ten Commandments, and he is not close to finished.