Mark Dooher is a prosperous San Francisco attorney and a prominent Catholic, the last person anyone would suspect of a brutal crime.  But Dooher, a paragon of success and a master of all he touches, is about to be indicted for murder.

Charged with savagely killing his own wife, Dooher is fighting for his reputation and his life in a high-profile case that is drawing dozens of lives into its wake--from former spouses to former friends, from a beautiful, naive young attorney to a defense lawyer whose own salvation depends on getting his client off.

Now, as the trial builds to a crescendo, as evidence is sifted and witnesses discredited, as a good cop tries to pick up the pieces of his shattered life and a D.A. risks her career, the truth about Mark Dooher is about to explode.  For in a trial that will change the lives of everyone it touches, there is one thing that no one knows--until it is much too late....

Payback is murder.

A beautiful woman paid it with her body.  A seedy lawyer used somebody else's money.  It's the vig--the exorbitant interest mob loan sharks take on their money.  Now, in the city by the Bay, everyone has to pay...

Down-and-out-lawyer Rusty Ingraham left behind a murdered woman and a houseboat splattered with blood.  All the evidence said Ingraham was in San Francisco Bay.  Dead.  But a friend of Ingraham's, former cop and prosecutor Dismas Hardy, isn't so sure.  And Hardy has to find out, because a stone-cold killer, now paroled, once threatened to kill Ingraham and Dismas Hardy both.

Now, to save his own skin, Dismas must face down liars and killers on both sides of the law.  From mob foot soldiers to brokenhearted lovers to renegade cops, a dozen lives are tied to the fate of Rusty Ingraham--and the payback has only just begun....