It is the third novel featuring Jack McEvoy, a Los Angeles investigative reporter for the consumer watchdog news service Fair Warning, as well as former FBI agent Rachel Walling.

Themes explored in the book include the decline of investigative journalism and the print-newspaper, the rise of fake news, the misogynistic incel movement, and the dangers of trafficking in DNA sequence data by an industry having no government oversight or regulations.

The story is told in first-person narrative from the perspective of McEvoy, however, it occasionally swaps to third-person when following antagonists Marshall Hammond and The Shrike.

Upon arriving at his apartment in the following days, reporter Jack McEvoy, now writing for the consumer watchdog news service Fair Warning out of Los Angeles, is stopped by two L.A.P.D.

They inform him that a woman he had a one-night stand with several months ago, Tina Portrero, was found dead in her shower, and that she had suffered atlanto-occipital-dislocation in what they believe was staged to look like an accident.

In the morning, a masked man breaks into Hammond's home and steals multiple profiles of women with the DRD4 gene.

He questions him on his operation, and then twists his neck until it breaks, similar to how a shrike executes its prey, before staging it as a suicide.

With their editor Myron Levin, Jack and Emily deduce that Hammond was running an illicit website where he sold the information of women with the DRD4 gene to incels who intended to take advantage of them, and that a user on the site, The Shrike, was instead murdering them.

The Shrike murders a man after falsely identifying him as Vogel, breaking his neck and throwing him off a parking garage.

After Jack recovers, he visits Rachel at her place of work and proposes that she joins him on investigating crimes themselves, as he is disappointed with a lack of justice and can no longer simply report on them.

"[3] Critic Marilyn Stasio wrote in The New York Times, "Connelly is in terrific form here, applying genre conventions to the real-life dangers inherent in the commercial marketing of genetics research.

"[4] Sandra Dallas wrote in the Denver Post that the novel "sheds light on the murky billion-dollar world of DNA testing.... [which has] little in the way of oversight or enforcement.