It's a new world for black ex-con Richard DeVries, back on the streets after a long, battering stretch in Marquette prison.
Twenty years before, during the infamous Detroit race riots, DeVries had been set up by his accomplices on an armored car robbery that went suddenly bad and bloody. Now all he wants is the two hundred grand they burned him for. And Amos Walker's help in getting it.
From the city's meanest streets to Lake Michigan's iciest depths to some powerful automakers' poshest corporate offices, Walker goes "downriver" - a Detroiter's term for any part of Michigan that doesn't include the city - tenaciously untangling a case whose answers ask their own deadly questions.
