As the stock market crashes, Attorney Leland Denton is hired to advise James McKenzie, an insurance examiner probing the possibly cooked books of a Los Angeles insurance company with suspicious assets backed by derivative investments. McKenzie is brutally murdered-the cops say by a hooker-but Denton discovers the dead man may have been involved in a conspiracy between the insurance company and a large Wall Street bank to embezzle three hundred million dollars of policyholder funds used to pay corporate bonuses and shore up the Banks own credit default swap and derivative-laden balance sheet. ...