When attorney David Cavanaugh takes a call from an old friend in New Jersey, he immediately offers to help. Chris Kincaid is now a US Senator and his dilemma concerns the disappearance of another member of their childhood gang Marilyn Maloney who the now-married Senator used to date. Then a blonde woman's body is hauled out of the Passaic River in David's home town of Newark, and the situation becomes more complicated there is a corpse to identify and, despite his fears about where this might be going, David leaves his wife and baby daughter in Boston to help Chris "sort things out".

The situation soon spirals out of control as Chris involves David in a lie to the police. Marilyn is dead, Chris is confirmed as her lover and the popular senator arrested for her murder engages David as his attorney. Now David finds himself drowning in a sea of uncertainty practising in a State he has never practised in before, defending one old friend accused of murdering another, and coming home, where his older brother, Sean, has a long-held grudge to settle.

Buried family secrets, devastating lies and a seemingly uncatchable killer, plague David and his unlikeliest of allies the career cop, who is supposed to be working for the prosecution. Worse still, David soon discovers that proving Chris innocence is linked directly to another mistake made by someone very close to him, many years before...