A second-generation homicide cop, ex-Major League baseball player, beleagured but loving father, heart-worn womanizer and renowned investigator, Seamus 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 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 Who was the second woman, the enigmatic wife of Cain?