A woman awakes in the morning to find that someone has picked her apartment's supposedly impregnable door lock and rearranged personal items, even sitting beside her while she slept. The intrusion, the police learn, is a message to the entire city of carnage to come. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to investigate and soon learn that the sociopathic intruder, who calls himself 'the Locksmith,' can break through any lock or security system...

Dr. Jake Rosen, deputy chief medical examiner for New York City, gets a call from his beloved mentor, Dr. Pete Harrigan, who as county medical examiner in his retirement upstate, has just been handed a pile of bones dug up in an excavation for a new mall. After Harrigan identifies the bones of Korean War vet James Albert Lyons, who mysteriously disappeared in 1963, Jake suggests that Lyons's daughter hire an attorney, Philomena "Manny" Manfreda, a...