The fifth book in the Inspector Green series finds Green eager to get back into the day-to-day fray of policing after doing administrative work in the office. He gets his chance when an unidentified woman is drowned in the Ottawa River. The investigation leads Green to Nova Scotia, where he learns the woman was the witness to her fiance's killing in a bar fight 10 years earlier. As Green and his team dig deeper into the military past, one of his female detectives is brutally beaten and may die. Green finds himself sucked not only into the murky past of a peacekeeping unit, but into the high-stakes present of a federal election race.