"When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon to collect overdue drug money, a severed hand is the very last thing he expects to find stashed in the client's refrigerator. Hutch quickly realizes that the hand induces uncontrollable madness: anyone in its proximity is overcome with a boundless compulsion for violence. Within hours, catastrophic forces are set into motion: dark-op government agents who want the hand for themselves are on Hutch's tail, more and more of the city's residents fall under the hand's influence and roam the streets as bloodthirsty beings, and the entire world stands at the precipice of apocalypse... But it's all the same for Katherine Moriarty, a singer whose sudden fame and precipitous downfall were followed by the mysterious death of her estranged husband--suicide, allegedly. The traumas she's experienced have made her an agoraphobe, shackled within the confines of her apartment. Her son, Nick, has moved home to care for her, quietly making his living as the middleman for Hutch's boss, who loves odd, rare, sometimes illegal objects. When Hutch calls Nick in distress, looking for someone else to take possession of the hand, mother and son are looped into a global struggle that threatens to decimate the precarious safety they've so painfully built. Katherine and Nick must evade both zombielike fevered ones and deceitful government agents, while exorcising family secrets that have risen from the dead-secrets, they soon discover, that might hold the very key to humanity's survival"-- Provided by publisher.