"It's the Apocalypse, baby! Just enjoy it."

Seven years after the Crash, the former metropolis of Las Vegas has become a battleground where desperate factions struggle amid the ruins. Clown-faced barbarians prowl the streets. Religious zealots fight to take total control of the populace. The rest of the locals struggle to survive. The only law is that of the gun.

When AJ Smith fled the rapidly deteriorating Los Angeles, she had hoped for a new life in Denver, but fate landed her in the middle of the anarchic and hostile hell that was Las Vegas. Her police training, medical skills, and humanity will be put to the test. Can she save the city, or will it destroy her?

Surviving her first month in Las Vegas changed AJ Smith in ways she had difficulty understanding, much less accepting. It shocked her out of the malaise that clouded her head when she boarded Air Sanchez Flight 001. It frightened her, both for her own safety, and for the very future of civilization. It angered her to see the daily procession of pointless carnage and its attendant waste of precious life and resources. She was sick of the anarchy, the violence, the hopelessness, and the self-predation into which humanity had descended.

AJ and her associates, Hector, Fernando, Sam, and John had already dispatched more than one threat, not because they were on a crusade like the genocidal Last Baptists, but because there was no other choice. The rule of the game in Post-Crash Las Vegas was kill or die. AJ was tired of playing the game. She decided to change the rule.

The cannibals, killer clowns, and crusaders of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas have been terminated. However, people continue to vanish amidst the ruins. Who commands the black helicopters, drones, and zombie commandos patrolling the outskirts of town? AJ is determined to find out who is pulling the strings, though it may require uniting the remnants of the very factions she helped bring down.

Cybernetic life didn't live up to the marketing buzz. The thoughts inside the organic replacement brains seemed as real to their owners as their original memories, recorded before their deaths. But their emotions were very different. When asked, as she often was, "What's it like to be a cyborg," Alana would either sanguinely reply that it was better than the alternative, or snidely offer to give the questioner the opportunity to find out.

Thirty-five years ago, Detective Alana Graves was killed by a terrorist's car bomb. Two weeks later, the police paid for her resurrection as a cyborg—a process euphemistically called, "retirement." In the intervening years, she rose to the rank of Detective Chief Inspector, despite constantly bumping into an invisible "silicon ceiling" of cyber-discrimination.

Alana took well to police work, immersing herself in her career. The dangers were of little concern, as she could be resurrected again, as long as she remained on the good side of the law. However, when her close friend and long-time assistant, Detective Benjamin Rhys, is killed in the line of duty and then denied the same cybernetic retirement benefit she had enjoyed for decades, something inside her ostensibly calm exterior snaps.

An anonymous and mysterious tip leads to a midnight raid on a waterfront warehouse, which goes unexpectedly wrong, causing Detective Chief Inspector Alana Graves to be placed on punitive leave. Her Crime Investigation Division is pulled into an increasingly complex web of cyborg kidnappings, with a rival being assigned to oversee the case. However, during the annual baseball all-star exhibition game between the Human and Cyber Leagues, she is drawn back to duty to manage what she believes to be the investigation of an unrelated, accidental death.

The sequel to 2013's Retiree takes place later in the same summer of 2090. It continues to examine the implications of cybernetic technology on a future society, looking at how it might affect professional sports and how a single country's strictly controlled monopoly on artificial life extension might affect its international relations. Detective Ben Rhys, newly resurrected, struggles to cope with his cybernetic existence. Detective Brett Crabtree, now deep in a relationship with cyberforensics analyst Wen Jing "Wendy" Lin, questions whether he wants to continue with his police career. DCI Graves finds herself placed on the short list of candidates for promotion to Section Chief when her boss, Chief Bennett, begins to show signs of physical distress.