Gregor Demarkian is having a hard time coming to terms with the death of his old friend and neighbor, George Tekemanian. Even though George lived to be one hundred, Gregor can't understand why he died, for no apparent reason other than old age.
Even his current case cannot completely distract him from this grievance with the inexorable ways of the universe. On first look it seemed like such an easy and obvious case: two people murdered, a woman and her much younger lover; a fire set to cover up the crime, and the woman's husband found at the scene, with no good explanation for his presence. The police had promptly arrested the husband, Arthur Heydrich. Unfortunately, when the lab analysis of the remains of one corpse, burnt beyond recognition, comes back a week later it appears the body everyone assumed was Heydrich's missing wife, Martha, is actually the body of an unidentified man.
The overwelmed and undermanned local police call in Gregor, a former FBI agent now turned investigative consultant. The whole situation is exacerbated by the fact that the crime took place in Waldorf Pines, an exclusive gated community of newly and ostentatiously wealthy residents, a number of whom are concealing various unsavory details about their private lives; and by the fact that most of them don't particularly like each other and all of them loathed Martha Heydrich. Then there's the fact that the rest of Pineville Station, a small, rural community hanging on by its fingernails, bitterly resents Waldorf Pines and its domineering and entitled attitude.
Actually it doesn't take that long for Gregor to figure out what happened. The problem is sifting out the truth from the entanglement of lies to find the evidence that will prove the case in court.
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