Van Dorn private detective Isaac Bell is investigating John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, when a sniper begins murdering opponents of Standard Oil, and it doesn't stop there. The murders--shootings, poisonings, staged accidents--have just begun as Bell tracks his phantom-like criminal adversary across the U.S., to Russia's war-torn Baku oil fields on the Caspian Sea, and back to America for a final, desperate confrontation. And this one will be the most explosive of all.