When a frat boy finds himself on trial in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for piracy on the high seas, Lawyer Rep Pennyworth, suspects he’s being used as an unwitting accomplice in a cheap publicity stunt. Meanwhile Rep’s wife Melissa, a professor, gets caught in the middle of a verbal firefight between two colleagues that soon escalates into burglary, theft, jury-tampering, forgery of an explosive papal document from World War II and murder. Melissa wants to protect a naïve undergraduate who might be implicated. But when one of the other suspects makes Melissa a cast-iron alibi, her search for the truth leads through a maze of gray lies, including her own. Dealing with an investigative reporter who’s still having flashbacks to 1968, a fellow professor whose acute political correctness masks ruthless academic ambition, an engineer whose father’s heart attack may have been either suicide or murder, and a brace of cunning lawyers out for blood, Rep and Melissa have to combine their talents to stay off the casualty list.