KIP CROSBIE is an art student who’s been plagued by emotional volatility her whole life. She’s a fiercely independent, passionate force of nature, who throws herself at life, at art, at people—and doesn’t really understand when it all doesn’t work out well.
Her mainstay in life have been her parents, who are both professors—Dad in robotics, Mom in psychology. They’ve seen Kip through numerous rough patches, sometimes with tough love, but always as her refuge and her rock.
The story opens with their deaths, which are staged to look like a murder-suicide. Kip knows it couldn’t have happened that way: They loved each other too much. She tries to convince the police, but when they won’t listen, she decides to prove it herself.
The timing is suspicious. Kip’s parents were just about to introduce their secret DOPPEL android, a companion robot who responds to emotions, a project worth millions of dollars. Kip feels certain they were killed for it. But to figure it all out, she must first master both her grief and her volatility, and—even harder for Kip—she must ask for help, first from a sympathetic police detective and her father’s business partner, then from the android itself.
As she gets closer to identifying the murderer, more bodies pile up. Finally, Kip must lure the killer to her father’s lab, where she’ll do everything in her power to see that justice is served.