Two years have passed since the unsavory events in Dust. Evan Reed is still cranky, but she's also dealing with the nagging effects of a gunshot wound. Her teenage daughter, Stevie has a new discovery to share, and Stevie's father, Dan, has married a woman half his age. Evan's childhood pal, Father Tim, has started questioning his faith, and Evan's relationship with publishing magnate, Julia Donne has all the earmarks of heading somewhere special.

The holidays are fast approaching when Evan is hired by the DNC to do dig up any undiscovered opposition research on the president's controversial nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. For starters, she has to work at light speed because the Senate is fast-tracking the nomination?and the judge, who is a darling of the far-right, is an avowed constructionist with a highly vetted paper trail nine miles long. The job begins to get murky when Evan discovers a link between the nominee and a now half-crazed, disgraced former U.S. senator who Evan was hired to vet many years ago. The stigma of that episode led Evan to vow to never work again for political kingmaker, Marcus Goldman, whose sticky fingerprints are all over this case.

And to make matters worse, Evan's personal Moriarty, Maya Jindal, reappears?up to her shapely eyebrows in the middle of an expanding web of lies, secrets, and betrayals that shrouds everything in Evan's life with hopelessness and uncertainty. The case takes an even more dangerous and eerily personal turn as Evan's descent into the fetid subterranean world of vested interests, dark money PACs, and barbaric private rituals threaten to explode everything she thought she knew about Father Tim, her own conflicted religious beliefs, and any shot she might have at a happy future with the Julia.

Galileo is Book 2 of the Evan Reed Mystery Series.