Allison Bentley is a top-flight technology consultant working with a large, very old-fashioned accounting firm in Chicago. The fact that she's gay as well as non-American (she's Australian) is already a cause of friction with some of the partners and when she reports to the partners that they are technologically out of date and facing future difficulties staying in business, the anger she causes results in her being dismissed. But Allison joins up with a small, modern accounting firm in the city and the combination of the talents she and her new partners have leads to extraordinary growth, much of it at the expense of her old employers. The tensions in her old firm as the partners see their business and livelihoods dying cause such panic that all their normal standards of human behaviour are abandoned as they try and stop Allison and her new partners from destroying them. Eventually, there is only one, violent, bloody outcome possible.