A contact tells Captain Zara Dewane that a policeman, politician, and gang leader will be having dinner in a buzzy local restaurant. Not one to turn down an opportunity to cop a cop, she arranges to dine there with the new man in her life. Half way through the meal, a car bomb explodes outside. Zara, head of the South African Internal Crime Unit, is up to her neck in the daily grind of investigating run-of-the-mill police violence and corruption when a string of bombings terrorizing Cape Town sets her in a new direction. As if that were not enough, she hears rumours of an ISIS training camp in the Karoo semi-desert being run by cops.

Confronted by untimely deaths and strange alliances, her suspicions of malfeasance reach into the powerful upper echelons of South Africa's police force. Soon, she dodges more than shrapnel as an entente between police, violent gangs, political interests and international terrorist elements being trained in South Africa coalesce in this incendiary novel of greed and corruption.