A California state auditor is shot to death after leaving a San Jose restaurant. At the same time, thirty miles away, John Barclay and his seventeen-year-old daughter are shot to death in a theater parking lot. The murders are not related. When Harrison Dane, an attorney working for her employer, suborns perjury to free the man who killed her father and sister, twenty-five-year-old Mary Barclay exacts her own retribution and stumbles down a path that changes her in ways she could never have imagined. Visited by the charming but enigmatic James Patch, she learns her actions have also made her an unwitting threat to a mysterious cabal that insists she end her pursuit of revenge. When she fails to comply, Patch instead saves her life and urges her to disappear. Fleeing to Chicago, she assumes a new identity, marries an aspiring contractor with a young daughter, and enjoys a peaceful family life until her husband is threatened by corrupt businessmen. Once again she plans to take matters into her own hands, but Patch reappears and together they eliminate the threat without her husband's knowledge. Although her relationship with the much older Patch deepens, he returns to California. There appears to be more to his interest in her than affection. When her world is again upended by an attempt on her life in an up-scale Chicago mall that results in the death of her assailant, she knows Dane has found her. Unwilling to abandon her new family or put their lives at risk, she decides to return to California to deal with him personally before he sends someone else, only to learn he is already on his way to Chicago and Patch may be the one contracted to kill her. The spectacle at the mall had drawn the interest of Chicago Tribune reporter Tom Dunagan, who suspects the mystery woman involved is Mary Barclay and responsible for several murders, and he is about to print the explosive story. She now has only a few hours to end the threats posed by all three men-Tom Dunagan, Harrison Dane, and James Patch-without losing her anonymity.