The United States is in turmoil nine months after an assassination attempt targeting the new president. Texas, home to the unsuccessful Nationalist Party candidate, has seceded from the Union, and other states are poised to follow. In Santa Fe, a priest who is an anti-nuclear activist is murdered. In Taos County, Sheriff Ulysses Walker investigates the murder of a young man associated with Nuclear Peace and Justice. Meanwhile, at Picuris Pueblo, Governor Ray Pando has a new neighbor-a religious cult called "The Elect," a group closely aligned with the insurgent Nationalist Party. When high-level nuclear waste goes missing from Los Alamos National Lab, Ulysses, Ray, and FBI agent LizBeth Tallichet start to connect the dots. Then, Ulysses learns that an even more dangerous threat, weapons-grade plutonium stolen from a facility in Wyoming, has reached Taos County. Nothing less than a civil war is at stake. Ulysses must race against time to neutralize the threat. The entire country is at risk, and Ulysses finds his life on the line.