Nicki Valentine's life is wearing thin under the drag of her unchosen role as the bad girl, the slut, and the endless psychodrama of a small Oregon town. She meets challenges with a quick, foul-mouthed wit, and observes the hypocrisy around her with wry humor. Her truest friend is her half-brother Quinn Halliday, whom she only discovered when she was nine. But in a town where few things are secret, nothing is forgotten, and the truth is game whose rules are exploited by the majority and rewritten by the powerful, she must outsmart the past before it catches her and bends her to its will once more.