Retired homicide detective Gideon Maxwell is fed up watching killers go free. After the eleven o'clock news he screws a silencer to an unregistered gun and repeats his oath to protect as he buckles on a bullet proof vest. Under the darkness of a sleeping city, alley rats bear witness to a summary court. Gideon sentences the guilty within the blink of an eye, or in some cases the bat of a curled eyelash, if his Yiddish-swearing partner happens to join him in the shadows of Washington, D.C. Huldah Lehrer, when not playing contract bridge behind the gates of Leisure World, keeps an eye out for the next Nazi war criminal living among her Holocaust-survivor friends. The latest looks like the man Gideon hunted forty years. Her next door neighbor has a port-wine stain over his left eye. So does the shooter who killed Gideon's fiancée during the botched assassination of Black Power spokesman Stokely Carmichael. Together Gideon and Huldah make strange bedfellows you may think. Looks can be intriguing, particularly when it comes to dishing out cold justice. Another sweltering day in Washington, DC, the metropolis slowly exhales. A tear dangles from Gideon Maxwell's nose before the thick of a salt and pepper beard sops his shame. Sitting in his library with the glow from two computer screens the only light, he silently weeps holding the picture of his dead fiancée and feels the shiver after her dying breath. Today is the anniversary of the night a stray bullet tore life from her body and left a man little than a shell. Anger and guilt fill the hole in his heart. Revenge is packed in every bullet tonight meant for the grinning man with steel-gray eyes and a purple birthmark over his left brow. After forty years as the top homicide detective in the Metropolitan Police Department, he is as haunted as the day he retired without catching his fiancée's killer. Before midnight her voice calls him to seek another cold-blooded killer to still his guilt. The next is sentenced and executed without remorse and juried trial. Plebeian criminals are of little interest to former Det. Maxwell. He wants the guilty who by trick or treasure beat the system. Seeing their imminent end, most beg for jail. But, "Never again," is what they hear a few heartbeats before their last. Although Washington, DC does not have the death penalty, Gideon's court has but one sentence. There is no limit to his term delivering summary justice. As long as the voice of his only love calls him, he will scour the streets for demons until he catches the one who robs him of eternal happiness.