A two-day cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of uptown Manhattan as quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs try to outguess Thompson Boyd, a man whose past has turned him into a killing machine. Boyd is after a high school girl from Harlem. The motive may have to do with a term paper that the girl is writing about an ancestor who was active in the early civil rights movement but was arrested for theft and disgraced.