Recruited to help the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service perform the nearly impossible, Lincoln Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs, manage to track down a cargo ship headed for New York City carrying two dozen illegal Chinese immigrants -- as well as the notorious human smuggler and killer known as "the Ghost." But when the Ghost's capture goes disastrously wrong, Rhyme and Sachs find themselves in a race against time to stop the Ghost before he can track down and murder the two surviving families who escaped the ship and vanished deep into the labyrinthine world of New York City's Chinese community. Over the next harrowing forty-eight hours, the Ghost brilliantly and ruthlessly hunts down the families, while Rhyme, aided by a quirky policeman from mainland China, struggles to find them before they die, and Saschs pursues a very different kind of police work -- forming a connection with one of the immigrants that may affect her relationship with her partner and lover, Lincoln Rhyme.