V. I. Warshawski may have left her previous South Chicago neighborhood, but she learns that she cannot get away it. When V. I. gets control coaching duties of the girls’ basketball team at her previous senior high school, she encounters an ill-equipped, ragtag group of gangbangers, fundamentalists, and teenage moms, who inevitably draw the detective into their family members woes. Through young Josie Dorrado, V. I. matches the girl’s mother, who voices her worries about sabotage in the tiny flag manufacturing plant where she about Fire Sale works. The largest employer within the South Side, discount-store behemoth By-Smart, will pay even less, and Ms. Dorrado doesn’t know how she’ll support her four children if the flag plant shuts down. The elder Dorrado’s worries are recognized when the vegetable explodes; V. I. is definitely injured and the dog owner is normally killed. As V. I. begins to research, she finds herself confronting the Bysen family members, who personal the By-Smart company. Creator William “Buffalo Costs” Bysen, right now in his eighties, offers four sons who quarrel with each other and with him; the oldest, “Young Mr. William,” is usually close to sixty and furious that his father doesn’t cede even more power to him. And then, there’s “Billy the Kid,” Teen Mr. William’s nineteen-year-old son, whose Christian idealism puts him on a collision course with his dad, his grandfather, and the company all together. When Billy runs aside with Josie Dorrado, V. I. is certainly squeezed between the needs of two completely different family members. As she attempts to find the errant teens, and to locate an especially cruel murderer, her very own life is nearly forfeit in the swamps that lie under the town of Chicago.