Retired Detective Kevin Beldon has left Ottawa and gone into retreat at a Buddhist monastery in California following his successful treatment for lung cancer. He’s trying to make sense of his life, but death is very much on his mind. And not just his own; he’s still trying to come to terms with the loss ten years earlier of his wife and son, victims of Dr. Ewan Randome, an evil mastermind whom Beldon had been forced to let escape. Aside from providing the occasional consultation for the California police, Beldon has happily gone into retirement, but when Global Patrol, the international police force, comes looking for his help on the Malachai case, a serial killer investigation that has them stymied, his interest is piqued. Beldon quickly deduces that the killings are related to his last unsolved case before his retirement two years earlier, a triple murder in his nation’s capital, and he suspects the involvement of his old nemesis Dr. Randome in this new round of assassinations. As events unfold, Beldon comes to realize how inevitable it was that Malachai’s killing spree would end in New York, and how inevitable his own final showdown with Randome has always been.