It’s the dawn of 1980. Miami is about to find itself in the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons. A future Pulitzer Prize winning reporter follows up on a tip. Could a police report about a traffic accident actually be a cover-up for a homicide? When Edna Buchanan begins to follow the trail, she can’t possibly know it’s a story that will end in murder, riots and a city on fire. She’s already got plenty of problems; a close relationship with a police department she now has to investigate, a murder rate that has tripled in two years and a new intern with priorities of her own.

As Buchanan writes the stories that will push the city past its limits, she’s challenged on two other fronts. Fidel Castro sends 125,000 refugees to Miami, including Cuba’s prison population. At the same time, Colombia exports both cocaine and violence to Miami. Buchanan has sworn to follow every murder in town, but how can one woman pursue the biggest story of her career while keeping up with an impossible spiral of crime?

As the city simmers, some are intent on putting out fires, others on finding scapegoats. In Buchanan’s world, where cops are her best friends and toughest enemies, things soon come to a boil.