In this contemporary novella a public school superintendent is brutally attacked after he lays off teachers in a Southern California city, and pugnacious police Detective Tom Briggs (Image of Evil, Hemingway Homicides) is called in to investigate. Within days the senior detective and his young partner are drawn into a sinister world of sex slavery, bizarre secret societies and wonton murder, where a whole new meaning is given to the Socratic Method taught in our schools.