On Christmas Eve in Eden, Florida, Wylie "Coyote" Melville, therapist and forensic consultant, is summoned to a horrific crime scene. Five members of the Halliday family have been brutally killed. Wylie's rare talent is an ability to read a crime scene, consider the evidence seen and unseen, and determine what's likely to have happened. The police are soon convinced that the deaths were a murder-suicide carried out by a broken and desperate Chafin Halliday, but Wylie's not so sure. As Wylie begins his own investigation with the help of his friend Bay Lettique--a poker-playing sleight-of-hand artist with links to the Everglades County underworld--he discovers a web of corruption involving the police union, Ponzi-scheming lawyers, county politicians, and the Russian mob.