This is a modern day mystery with echoes of recent American history (and histories far older, through the Tarot). The hero
is a very unheroic seeming left-over from the revolutionary era of the Weather
Underground movement from the 1960s and 1970s, still on the run from his past (and Amerika's). His best friend and lover, Sally, is a paraplegic whose best friend from childhood has been falsely accused of murder. Therese, her friend, is a BDSM (bondage, discipline,
sado-masochism) dominant, a Mistress, one of whose clients is found dead in their loft in the very accoutrements that he and Therese use in their play --- with her fingerprints on the equipment. So Warren plunges into the darker underground world of the dominant and submissive lovers of pain and strange pleasure, and of each other. Sally plunges into the high-tech world of computer security firms, one of which the victim had owned, and run. Wheels within wheels, and dealing with the illusions of control and power, as well as the unknown killer, escalate, until a shocking and totally unexpected climax nearly brings an end to them both. There is quite a bit of discussion of two Tarot cards in particular: The Hanged Man and The World, and a rather mystical and unconventional (numerologically speaking) interpretation of numbers in relation to life itself and our lives in particular.