I'm into something a little weird here, the letter said. I don't want to worry you, but if anything unusual should happen, get in touch with Kidd, okay?

Before Lucas Davenport and the brilliant Prey novels, there was Kidd — artist, computer whiz, and professional criminal — and his sometime partner / sometime lover LuEllen. The Army left Kidd with a dislike for bureaucracy and the skills to do something about it, but it didn't prepare him for the day a woman would call and tell him his colleague Jack Morrison was dead. Jack was supposedly killed by a jittery security guard who caught him raiding a company's files in the middle of the night, but that story just doesn't sit right with Kidd. The more he investigates the company and its ambitious owner, the more convinced he becomes that Jack stumbled onto something that got him murdered. And that unless he and LuEllen got to the bottom of it all quickly, the next bodies might very well be their own...