For Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid’s 32nd birthday, she gets an unusual gift: a homicide call out. The crime scene: the elite Hillside neighbourhood in Portland, Oregon. The victim: hotshot investigative reporter Percy Crenshaw, who has been bludgeoned to death in his carport. Tensions in the city have been running high. The previous week, a police officer shot and killed an unarmed mother of two in what he claims was self-defence; in the aftermath, protestors have waged increasingly agitated anti-police protests. Crenshaw’s death, it seems, is not unrelated: within a matter of hours, police arrest two young men who appear to have embarked on a crime spree in the aftermath of the protests. The case looks straightforward, especially when one of the suspects confesses.