Los Angeles Police Detective Margaret Nolan and her partner have worked a lot of different cases, ones where things aren’t always as they appear. And it’s Nolan’s job to find the truth in the darkness around her. When they’re called to the scene of what looks like a fatal carjacking, Nolan soon realizes her victim was a founder of a company about to sell for millions, and within a day of his death, his partner’s wife is abducted. As Nolan learns more about the victim and his life, she gets pulled into a disturbing world of sex, violence and big business --- and an even darker world, where whispers of an "Angel of Death" are beginning to surface.

Los Angeles has many faces: the real LA where regular people live and work, the degenerate underbelly of any big city, and the rarefied world of wealth, power and celebrity. LAPD Detective Margaret Nolan’s latest case plunges her into this insular realm of privilege and gives her a glimpse of the decay behind the glitter. Beloved actor Evan Hobbes is found in the rubble of a Malibu rockslide, a day after a fake video ruins his career. It’s not clear to Nolan if it’s an accident, a suicide or a murder, and things get murkier as the investigation expands to his luminary friends and colleagues. Meanwhile, Hobbes’ agent is dealing with damage control, his psychotic boss and a woman he’s scorned.

LAPD Detective Margaret Nolan is struggling to move forward after the death of her brother in Afghanistan and taking a life in the line of duty. A moment of weakness leads to cocktails with a colleague --- an attraction she knows could be dangerous --- at the luxurious Hotel Bel-Air bar. A stroll through the grounds leads to a grim discovery beneath the surface of Swan Lake: the body of a successful attorney who made his fortune in international trade. It initially appears to be death by misadventure, but the case is anything but straightforward. As a series of shocking revelations emerge, Nolan finds herself confronting a sinister cabal that just might destroy her and everyone she loves.

Sam Easton --- a true survivor --- is home from Afghanistan, trying to rebuild a life in his hometown of LA. Separated from his wife, bartending and therapy sessions are what occupy his days and nights. When friend and colleague Melody Traeger is beaten by her boyfriend, she turns to Sam for help. When the boyfriend turns up dead the next day, a hard case like Sam is the perfect suspect. But LAPD Detective Margaret Nolan, whose brother recently died serving overseas, is sympathetic to Sam's troubles and can't quite see him as a killer. She's more interested in the secrets Melody might be keeping and the developments in another murder case on the other side of town.

Detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are called to the gruesome homicide of Kelly Ramage. Found in a friend's vacant house, this was no random attack, and clues reveal that she was living a very dangerous secret life. Magozzi and Gino trace her steps back to an art gallery where she was last seen alive. The gallery seems like a dead end, but the art is disturbing and exploitative. It may very well be inspiring a sadistic killer. Tipped off about a year-old murder that is a mirror-image of Kelly's crime scene, Gino and Magozzi enlist the aid of Grace MacBride and her eccentric, tech genius partners in Monkeewrench Software to help them decipher the digital trail that might connect the cases.

Gregory Norwood is Minnesota’s most beloved philanthropist, and the story of his son’s overdose was splashed across the front page of all the papers. When a photojournalist sets out to get a candid shot of the highly successful businessman on the one-year anniversary of his son’s death, he’s shocked to find Norwood dead with a smoking gun in his hand. Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are called in to handle the delicate case. With no suspects and an increasing tangle of digital evidence, Magozzi calls on Grace MacBride, Monkeewrench Software’s founder and chief computer genius. She and her motley crew of partners begin to unravel connections between Norwood’s death and an even larger plot.

When Minneapolis homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are called to a crime scene in a heavily wooded city park, everything about the setting is all too familiar. And when they discover a playing card on the victim's body, their worst fears are confirmed --- there’s a serial killer operating in the city for the first time in years. Weary of the darker side of their computer work for law enforcement, Grace MacBride and her unconventional partners at Monkeewrench Software agree to take on a private missing-persons case in a small farming community in southwestern Minnesota. As the violence accelerates in Minneapolis, Magozzi and Gino soon realize their killer is planning to complete the deck, and they enlist Monkeewrench to help stop the rampage.

Chuck Spencer and Wally Luntz, two friends scheduled to meet in person for the first time, are murdered on the same night, several miles apart. Lydia Ascher comes home to find two dead men in her basement. When homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth discover her connection to their current cases, they suspect she is a target as well. The same day, a terminally ill man is kidnapped from his home, an Alzheimer’s patient goes missing, and a baffling link among all the crimes emerges. This series of inexplicable events sends the detectives 60 years into the past to search for answers --- and straight to Grace MacBride’s Monkeewrench, a group of eccentric computer geniuses who devote their time and resources to helping the cops solve the unsolvable.

As Minneapolis homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth struggle to link three gruesome crimes, they learn that there have been similar murders in other cities around the U.S. Piece by piece, evidence accumulates, pointing to a suspect that shocks them to the core, uncovering a motive that puts the entire Midwest on high alert and Monkeewrench in the direct line of fire.