It is Christmastime. Inside the fashionable Avanti nightclub, the young, rich, and self-indulgent patrons celebrate with fine, exotic cuisine and the best champagne amid warm and inviting surroundings. Outside, in the bitter cold, shadowy derelicts beg for scraps of food, sleep where and when they can, and live out their existences in bleak anonymity. Two worlds in seeming opposition: one full of light and warmth and pleasure, the other full of darkness and cold and misery. Yet something connects them. Something deadly.

Richard Coburn, the driven and unscrupulous co-owner of the Avanti, hires private investigator Jack Dwyer to look into a grim secret that threatens the success of the Avanti, but he won’t tell Dwyer what it is. Then Coburn is shot to death in the Avanti’s parking lot.

Dierdre Coburn, the dead man’s widow, turns to Dwyer for help in finding her husband’s killer, but the detective has little to go on. He still doesn’t know why Coburn hired him in the first place, and Dierdre, the woman who’s retained him, is a sultry but nasty piece of work who may or may not be guilty of the crime herself. A busboy who had endured Coburn’s taunts was seen near the spot where Coburn’s body was found, Coburn’s fellow owner Tom Anton seems unusually jumpy and suspicious, and Coburn had just jilted his mistress, the soft-eyed bartender Jackie. Suspects abound within the shining little world of the nightclub.

But it is to the shadow-world outside that Dwyer looks for answers, a world where insanity makes a perverse sort of sense and a man’s agony rules his actions. The deeper Dwyer delves into the world of the dispossessed, the more it becomes apparent that there is a sinister clue linking the glittering world of the Avanti with the living hell of a public shelter down the street. If Dwyer can uncover that connection, he can solve the murder of Coburn, but it soon becomes clear that the killer is not only very dangerous, but determined to stop him.

Jack Dwyer returns in a gripping novel of murder at the edge, where the privileged and the desperate clash. The shadows of the street and the harsh light of the nightclub play off each other in Ed Gorman’s most powerful work to date.