Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans' Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction. But following the death of a close friend, he returns to the streets—not only the urban ones he has conquered but also those of the rural South that he escaped long ago—to search for the runaway daughter he didn't know his friend had.

Griffin discovers that we rarely know anyone, even those closest to us. And he now finds that he must also face the two things he most fears: memories of his parents and his own relationship with his now-vanished son.