Inspector Angel Cardenas has seen plenty of corpses like the one in the Quetzal inburb - just another Juan Doe robbed of his cash, cards, internal organs, and then dumped in a gutter. However Cardenas soon learns this murder is anything but ordinary...

First, the infallible DNA-ID database insists the cadaver is that of two people - local executive George Anderson and a mysterious Texas businessman. Then Anderson's wife and daughter, Surtsey Mockerkin and Katla, turn up missing, their posh suburban home has been retrofitted into a huge time bomb... and at least three mob syndicates from as many continents are competing to capture or kill twelve-year-old-Katla.

Who is the dead man, and why is his daughter being hunted? Relying on his training as a nearly telepathic intuit, Inspector Cardenas embarks on a search that leads him from sex parlours and stimstick clubs of the Strip - where kids are deadly and even the music kills - to an undersea control room where computer crimes are committed by criminal by criminal computers.

Finding Katla Anderson is the key to unravelling the deadly mystery, but what Angel Cardenas doesn't know is that the closer he gets to the girl, the closer the assassins are getting to them...