In First Offence, Nancy Taylor Rosenberg draws on her personal experience as a California probation officer to create a remarkable heroine in Ann Carlisle, who suddenly finds herself the target of someone who wishes to harm not only her but also her teenage son. As a probation officer, Ann knows what it means to walk a treacherously thin line between dangerous criminals who have scores to settle - and the system that seeks to punish them.

As a wife, she holds closely guarded secrets about her life with her police officer husband, who inexplicably vanished four years ago. And as a woman who has been sexually reawakened by a handsome, hard-driving district attorney after being alone too long, she is haunted by the specter of a mate who may suddenly reappear...and terrified of an unknown enemy who seems to know her every move and thought.

1. The danger is clear to Ann from the moment a bullet hits her while she is leaving work one day. Ironically, the man who comes to her and saves her life is one of the first offenders she is supervising - convicted drug dealer Jimmy Sawyer. What was this smooth-talking, slick-moving, almost too good-looking young man doing at the scene of the shooting?

No one is able to help Ann find answers, not her dynamic, career-obsessed lover, or the cops who were buddies of her missing husband and who look on her as prone to shock and fantasy - especially when the evidence of an unspeakable crime she finds in Jimmy Sawyer's house disappears before she can prove it existed. Meanwhile, she is investigating a man accused of a series of brutal rapes, never suspecting his case will have a bearing on her own growing peril.