Lou Prophet and his sometime-sidekick, sometime-lover, Louisa Bonaventure, are lured to an old, abandoned cavalry outpost in southeast Colorado, and ambushed. Louisa is badly wounded. While the Vengeance Queen teeters on the edge of death, Prophet hunts the seven nightriders who tried to kick them both out with a cold shovel. In the meantime, he runs into a town teeming with scandalous secrets and seven devils whomust pay for their sins in blood.

A new kind of bounty hunter is infesting the west. Bounty hunters who steal the quarry of other hunters. Bounty poachers is what Lou Prophet calls them, and it's men of this seedy, back-shooting variety who shadow Prophet and Louisa as they try to get the notorious killer and rapist Chaz Savidge from Dakota Territory to Denver, where they intend to turn their prisoner over to the Chief U.S. Marshal. But maybe Prophet's and Louisa's most formidable foe isn't among the countless men hunting them, after all. Maybe their most dangerous enemy is a young, griefstricken pioneer widow whose husband and lover lie dead on her cabin floor.