In Blackwater Falls, Colorado, veteran police officer Harry Cooper is hot on the heels of some local vandals when the situation turns deadly. Believing one of them has a gun, Harry opens fire and Duante Young, a young Black man, is killed. The "gun" in his hands was a bottle of spray paint. Meanwhile, in nearby Denver, a drug raid goes south and a Latino teen, Mateo Ruiz, is also killed. The Denver Police force is spread thin between the two cases, and protests on both sides begin. Detective Inaya Rahman and her boss, Lieutenant Waqas Seif, have their work cut out for them to consider the guilt of the perpetrators and their victims. While Inaya is forced to reckon with her own prejudices and work through those of her colleagues, she must discover the truth of what really happened on one fateful night in Blackwater Walls.

Girls from immigrant communities have been disappearing for months in the Colorado town of Blackwater Falls, but the local sheriff is slow to act and the fates of the missing girls are largely ignored. At last, the calls for justice become too loud to ignore when the body of a star student and refugee --- the Syrian teenager Razan Elkader --- is positioned deliberately in a mosque. Detective Inaya Rahman and Lieutenant Waqas Seif of the Denver Police are recruited to solve Razan’s murder and quickly uncover a link to other missing and murdered girls. But as Inaya gets closer to the truth, Seif finds ways to obstruct the investigation. Inaya may be drawn to him, but she is wary of his motives: he may be covering up the crimes of their boss, whose connections in Blackwater run deep.

Detective Rachel Getty is asked by her boss, Esa Khattak, to look into the death of Christopher Drayton, who may have been a war criminal with ties to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. But as Rachel and Khattak dig deeper into Drayton’s life and death, every question seems to lead only to more questions. Had the specters of Srebrenica returned to haunt Drayton at the end, or had he been keeping secrets of an entirely different nature?