Raised by loving adoptive parents, San Francisco private investigator Wyatt Hunt never had an interest in finding his birth family—until he gets a chilling text message: “How did your mother die?” The answer is murder, and Hunt takes on a case he never knew existed, unsolved for decades. His family’s dark past unfurls in dead ends. Child Protection Services, who suspected Hunt was being neglected, is uninformed; his birth father, twice-tried but never convicted of the murder, is in hiding; Evie, his mother’s drug-addicted religious fanatic of a friend, is untraceable. And who is the texter, and how is this person connected to Hunt? Time is running out. Insisting the murderer is out there, the texter refuses to be identified.