It was part street theater, part civil disobedience, and pure Berkeley: Someone was waging guerrilla warfare on the city's meter maids and their beloved parking meters. But when the prankster took detective Jill Smith and her colleagues on a wild chase into a deep, overgrown ravine, the game led to murder. The dead woman was Madeleine Riordan. A firebrand attorney who was not above an act of civil disobedience herself, Madeleine spent her last days in a nursing home that was perched on the edge of a ravine. Praying into the extraordinary life and times of Madeleine Riordan, Jill discovered a strange connection between the meter capers and the frail, cancer stricken woman who had once been an unyielding defender of individual liberties. And then Jill found something else: a crime Madelene had witnessed, and died trying to stop.