From the introduction: The streets are wet with blood, rain, and waste water from broken sewer mains. The city is sweltering under a punishing heat wave and in the wake of rolling blackouts crime has become epidemic across the city and much of the Eastern Seaboard. Indeed all of America seems poised on the edge of a dark age of violence, corruption, and hopelessness. It is dark times. They are saying there is no one to look to that can save us.