On a quiet April night, San Antonio's peace is shattered by insistent screams. A black maid working late in a downtown office building says she was attacked and raped-by a young man who appears dumbfounded and confused as he is handcuffed and taken away. The accused tells a preposterous story-that the woman appeared at his office door, ripped off her own clothes, clawed her own flesh, and began to scream "rape" before he knew what was going on; that for some unknown reason, he has been framed. A prosecutor's dream, A defense attorney's nightmare. For Mark Blackwell, the dream and the nightmare will be merged in the most difficult case of his career, one he can afford neither to win nor to lose. For he has just been elected District Attorney of this old, south Texas city. And the young man who has just been accused of rape is his son. District Attorney Blackwell is a man who knows how the system works. For many in San Antonio, he is the system. He has sacrificed everything-his family, his marriage, even his secret love affair-to his career. Now as David Blackwell is about to go to trial, the D.A. must decide if he is willing to put it all on the line to save a son whom-he discovers to his horror, twenty years too late-he hardly knows. In law as in politics, power makes its own way. Mark Blackwell can use the connections and shortcuts he knows all too well to "fade the heart" away from his son-or away from himself But he cannot do both. If his son gets off easy, it will mean the end of his career. If he allows his son to go to prison, even if he's guilty, his already-strained family will never survive. And most chilling of all is the question Blackwell keeps hidden even from his wife, who believes David's innocence with a mother's perfect faith. Does he really believe his son's account of what happened that night? And if his son is innocent, it can only mean that he himself is the target of a frame-up...that District Attorney Mark Blackwell, a man of justifiable pride and power, has enemies he has never even dreamed of, enemies, whose vile motives he has not yet begun to fathom...