In First Offense, 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 police officer husband, who inexplicitly vanished over 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 on an unknown enemy who seems to know her every move and thought.

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 aid and saver 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.