Frannie Rose backs her walker into the ladies' room at the Wolf Creek Senior Center. "It's a bitch," she says to herself, wincing as she bangs into the door. When she turns around, she confronts the bloody body of Elyse Crane protruding from the floor of a stall. As it turns out, Frannie could just have easily been referring to Elyse.

Frannie, much to the despair of Detective Oleros, has a sabertooth tongue and wisecracks her way into clues to Elyse's murder, stumbles into a teenage-girl trafficking ring, and survives a fentanyl-poisoning attempt before the kidnapping climax that reveals the killer and even greater evil. Throughout, Frannie survives her own PTSD, facing her own past when its terrors are triggered by the blood-soaked present.