Geneva Chase encounters a deceptive cast of suspects who pull her into a high-speed chase into the Whisper Room, a dating app for only the most elite members of society --- where affairs, blackmail and murder are all on the menu. When wealthy men crave no-strings-attached encounters, the Whisper Room promises to deliver. Escorts are turning up dead, and Geneva is ready to dive into the exclusive dating ring and catch the killer. But then one of the Whisper Room's escorts turns up murdered --- and she looks a lot like the blond in the blackmail video. The more Geneva digs, the more blackmail victims and potential suspects she finds --- and the more people she angers. Dangerous people, with links to organized crime and human trafficking. Will this story of a lifetime put a premature end to her own?

Just days before an oil executive is scheduled to give a pseudo-scientific report to Congress, aiming to delay crucial action on climate change for decades, he and his wife are found shot to death in their Greenwich, Connecticut home. It's ruled a murder-suicide, but their son refuses to accept this conclusion and hires Geneva Chase, ex-journalist-turned-detective, to prove otherwise. With the report still due to Congress, the lead scientist of the study gone missing, climate activists turning violent, and members of the executive's family seeking revenge, Geneva races to find answers, stay alive and stop the report from reaching Washington.

Veteran reporter Geneva Chase is at the end of her professional rope. Battling alcoholism and bad choices, she's lost every major news job she's had. Working at her hometown newspaper is her last chance to redeem herself --- and now the paper's future is in doubt. Then she lands the story of a lifetime: Six nude bodies are found hacked to pieces in a Queen Anne mansion on the coast of Long Island Sound. The sensational headline is picked up by the metro papers, and Geneva is back in the game, using her reporter's nose to sniff out the secrets of Sheffield's rich and entitled citizens. As her investigation leads her deeper into dangerous waters, her toxic affair with a married man and her inability to get sober threaten to undo everything she has worked so hard to achieve.

The nude bodies of a corrupt judge and a Jane Doe are found under the icy, black waters at Groward Bay Marina, chained to the prongs of a mammoth fork lift. A videotape points to Merlin Finn, a ruthless gang leader with a proclivity for bondage and S&M who recently had broken out of prison. Journalist Geneva Chase investigates pill mills, crooked doctors and a massive money laundering scheme in an attempt to identify the murdered woman and find the killer. She is clearly hot on the killer's trail, but when she is kidnapped and held at the mercy of the criminals she hoped to stop, it looks like her chance to uncover the darkness that has seeped through her hometown may be lost forever.

The newshound in reporter Geneva Chase spurs her to bad, if not downright dangerous, choices as two unrelated crimes unexpectedly collide. A 15-year-old-girl at her ward's high school has vanished along with her English teacher. Is this same-old, same-old, or something more? And then there's the abused woman who torched her sadistic husband, and how to keep her out of the clutches of powerful mobsters --- and thus, out of the news. Out on the crime beat, Geneva works to unravel the connection, if any, between these two disparate stories while her newspaper is put up for sale, a high-flying Hollywood production lights up the town, and her personal battles accelerate.