My life was ordinary until three years ago when I was thrown out of a downtown hotel window. My name is Robbie Brownlaw, and I am a homicide detective for the city of San Diego. I am twenty-nine years old.I now have synesthesia, a neurological condition where your senses get mixed up. Sometimes when people talk to me, I see their voices as colored shapes provoked by the emotions of the speakers, not by the words themselves. I have what amounts to a primitive lie detector. After three years, I don�t pay a whole lot of attention to the colors and shapes of other people�s feelings, unless they don�t match up with their words.When Garrett Asplundh�s body is found under a San Diego bridge, Robbie Brownlaw and his partner, McKenzie Cortez, are called on to the case. After the tragic death of his child and the dissolution of his marriage, Garrett - regarded as an honest, straight-arrow officer - left the SDPD to become an ethics investigator, looking into the activities of his former colleagues. At first his death, which takes place on the eve of a reconciliation with his ex, looks like suicide, but the clues Brownlaw and Cortez find just don�t add up. With pressure mounting from the police and the city�s politicians, Brownlaw fights to find the truth, all the while trying to hold on to his own crumbling marriage. Was Garrett�s death an �execution� or a crime of passion, a personal vendetta or the final step in an elaborate cover-up?