At the age of thirty-eight, Zeno Aristos is trying to find himself. Much to his girlfriend's chagrin, he's quit the New York City police force and can't figure out what he wants to do with his life. A job in security doesn't appeal to him. Bodyguard work leaves him cold. Only single-wall handball, with its street culture of razor-edged competition, seems to get his juices flowing. Then someone close to Zeno is kidnapped, and his search for that person leads him through a gauntlet of increasingly dark and cryptic forces, taking him from the sullen streets of gang-ravaged Brooklyn to the manicured cemeteries of suburban New Jersey to the slick corporate penthouses of midtown Manhattan. The deeper Zeno digs, the more certain he is that he's dealing not with a mere earthly adversary, but with an ancient entity steeped in the deepest and most malevolent of mysteries.