San Diego Detective Sergeant Seamus Moynihan must solve one of the world's oldest abiding mysteries in order to catch the killer behind a series of bizarre sex murders that rock Southern California.

A second-generation homicide cop, ex-Major League baseball player, beleagured but loving father, heart-worn womanizer and renowned investigator, Moynihan figures after sixteen years on the job he's already witnessed the worst kind of violence humans can visit upon another.

Then he's summoned to a crime scene where the victim, a naked man, has been tied to a bed then assaulted with North America's deadliest pit viper: an eastern diamondback rattlesnake.

Aided by a team of crack detectives, Moynihan enters a deadly world of twisted eroticism, hot herpetology, fanatical spiritual cults and ultimately the oldest mystery in the Bible, a riddle that has frustrated religious scholars for centuries: Who was the second woman, the enigmatic wife of Cain?

And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife . . .
--Genesis 4:16-17

That's the only reference in the Bible to Cain's wife. She's never named. Nor does Genesis explain the origins of the woman said to have married and bore children to Adam and Eve's second son, history's first and most notorious murderer.

With the help of a Biblical scholar whose theories about the second woman prove integral to the investigation, Moynihan encounters reptile experts on the cutting edge of television celebrity, Internet swingers exploring the dark depths of human sexuality . . . and a chilling fundamentalist sect living in the kudzu jungles of Alabama.