Exiled from the police department, Sam Laska returns to Chicago to keep a promise he never should have made.
Sixteen years ago, homicide detective Sam Laska made a promise to the family of a murdered man: he would find who killed their husband and father. The murder on the Green Line, one of Chicago’s iconic elevated commuter trains, looked like nothing more than an armed robbery gone bad. But the investigation stalled, the murder was never solved, and Laska’s promise was never kept. Relegated to a dusty shelf in storage, the file became a cold case forgotten by all except the dead man’s daughter.
Now, eight years after being driven from the job he loved, a threat by the dead man’s daughter forces Laska to return to the dormant investigation. As he begins to look into the murder, Laska learns a former partner who worked the case was killed in a suspicious accident. He sets off to prove his partner was murdered while continuing to probe the Green Line case. Fighting through a lack of evidence and dodging the police who cannot allow him to poke his nose into an open homicide, Laska discovers a common thread weaving through both deaths.
The two cases wind around each other like strands of barbed wire and, as he struggles to untangle them, Laska is determined to honor the homicide detectives’ mantra: no one should get away with murder.