In 1963 Mississippi, a 12 year-old African-American girl is gang-raped by Ku Klux Klansmen. Relocated to Brooklyn, NY immediately afterward, she sets her sights on revenge. Following eight years of intensive training, having grown into a strikingly beautiful assassin, Desiree Devine accomplishes her mission.
Shortly after returning north, she’s assaulted one late night on a dark street. Upon subduing her assailant, she experiences an unfamiliar sense of exhilaration, even sexual arousal, and soon makes late-night “hunting expeditions” for would-be predators an extension of her revenge.
On one of these expeditions, in Brooklyn’s “Little Italy” section, she’s suddenly surrounded by three ruffians stumbling out of a bar. She dispatches two of them with chops and kicks, but the third pulls a gun. Tony Marino, a local private eye, appears from out of nowhere and knocks the gunman unconscious. Desiree’s reaction is not gratitude, but fury. In her mind, he has interrupted her mission, and she accuses him of “ruining everything.” Having just stepped into her life, Tony watches her march out of his. He is bewitched, though, and without a clue yet as to why.
But Desiree’s close friend Lori, whom she’d rescued from an assault, has a mystery to solve. Her big sister was the first victim of the Yellow-Tulip Killer, a serial murderer still at large. Lori insists on hiring Tony to work with them to bring the killer to justice. Using skill, stealth and luck, the three identify the killer and find the incriminating evidence. The problem is that they found it through illegal means.
While Tony strategizes on persuading the police to reopen this cold case, the women take matters into their own hands. They lure the killer into the wooded area where his eight victims were found. With her bare hands and feet, Desiree beats him to death, and plants clues that will lead police to the evidence. Afterward, she lures Tony to her place for violence-fueled sex. When he finds out what she’s done, he’s horrified. But, still, he can’t escape her magnetic pull.
That magnetism, now mutual, brings them together again and again. But as their relationship evolves, her ability to trust is repeatedly tested. When he is inexplicably tailed and shot at, he breaks contact with Desiree to keep her out of harm’s way. She assumes he’s hiding an affair with another woman. Almost as soon as he eliminates that external threat, she sees him leaving his house one morning with a client, a glamorous redhead. The closer she gets to him, the hotter her jealousy flares. Equally hot are their reconciliations, which last only until the next misunderstanding arises.
At one point, the police theorize that Tony might have been the actual Yellow-Tulip Killer. To keep them away from Desiree, he again cuts off contact. This stokes her fury, since she concludes he’s nothing but a no-good liar, who “got his taste for white meat back.”
Lori intervenes at the crisis point, while Tony is on the verge of being framed for murder, and after Desiree has gone off on a violent, self-destructive rampage. Once Desiree understands what’s really going on, she insists on putting herself forward as Tony’s alibi. He reluctantly agrees, and the case against him begins to fall apart.
Desiree’s campaign becomes more purposeful now. She becomes a champion of endangered women. Tony acts as her backup and lookout, as she prowls the night streets on predator patrols. While their love blossoms, in the face of dangerous neighborhood racial hostility, they deal together with wife-beaters, actual and would-be rapists, Tony’s Mafia associates, the crooked cops he once worked with and a pedophile priest, even another serial killer. The remedies they apply are extra-legal at best, but effective.
On their first night living together, Tony realizes that, having fallen in love with an Avenging Angel, he’s bought into Desiree’s unusual moral code. His final thought that night is, “Heaven help us both.”
Tasha finds herself at the mercy of a stranger while on the run from a group of raiders in a grim and lawless post-apocalyptic winter. The stranger gives her a safe place to stay, but when she finds his collection of brutal kink toys, she wants him to dominate her in ways she’s only ever dreamed of. But life outside their cozy oasis is dangerous, and when her dom’s friends find out about her, they’re eager to play with her, too.
