Joe Nader is an experienced and respected by the book NYPD officer, so good at the job he is the designated training officer but Nader has a past that haunts him.
Tasha Escher is an Upper East Side wife of a renowned economist Simon Escher and mother of twelve year old Alex and nineteen year old Jessie, a student of University of Pennsylvania. Tasha is European born and educated. She met Simon when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and he brought her back to New York and married her twenty years earlier.
In December of 1992, the police are called to the Escher apartment because Tasha Escher was to pick her father up at Kennedy and never arrived. It seems she went out to walk her father’s puppy, Maxie, in his hand knitted red coat, and disappeared.
Tasha’s unexplained disappearance causes a family crisis. Jessie leaves college. Simon breaks down. The housekeeper Lulu Smith who speaks with a German accent may know more than she lets on. She arranges a meeting with a man both she and, it seems, Tasha knew well. Jessie begins to take charge of her life. She leans on a young detective on the case, Diane LeBow, especially after she finds out the Simon has been having an affair with his research assistant.
A seasoned detective on the case tells a rookie: “It happens sometimes a missing person just wants to disappear, she has a fight with her husband, life gets too much for her, she walks away. And sometimes it’s something darker.”
