Former Nashville detective and Rhodes Scholar, Shane Hadley, hasn't been involved in a murder case since a stray bullet transected his spinal cord, ending his career and stranding him in a wheelchair.
One Sunday morning, the familiar pop, pop, pop of gunshots draws Shane like a magnet. He wheels himself onto the balcony of his apartment overlooking Printers Alley, the once-beating heart of Music City USA. There, he sees Bonz Bagley, proprietor of Bonz's Booze and Music, lying dead in front of his club.
Shane's wife, neurologist Katya Karpov, is doubly alarmed by the murder--she was fond of the old man, and also, she knows that he was taking an experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease that was invented by Katya's boss at the university.
Hardy Seltzer, the police detective assigned to the case, knows Shane as a department legend from before the accident that sidelined him. When fate brings them together, Hardy takes advantage of Shane's uncanny intuitions, launching the two of them on a quest through the worlds of country music, academic intrigue, shady business dealings, and pervasive amorality.
Under growing pressure from the Nashville media and a crusading lawyer, as well as higher-ups in the police department, the two unlikely allies race to make sense of a seemingly pointless murder that threatens to destroy almost everyone who gets drawn into the mystery.