The vig

'Louis Baker gets out of jail today and he's gonna try to kill us both.' That was Rusty Ingraham's message when he turned up at the Little Shamrock bar where Dismas Hardy, formerly of the SFPD and DA's office, worked as a barman. Sure enough, that night Ingraham fails to ring Hardy as planned, leaving only a trail of blood leading into the canal where Ingraham moors his houseboat - and his girlfriend, shot dead. Now Hardy is waiting for his turn. To Hardy's fury, the police refuse to go into the projects and arrest the violent Baker. Now it's up to Hardy to find more compelling evidence to link Baker to the crime. Gradually Hardy begins to see there's more going on than he first suspected, including a mystery tied to his own past and a bad-tempered loan shark whose collection of interest, the 'vig', is already the key to one killing - and to a second Hardy would do anything to avoid. His own.