"People come to seven o'clock Mass for the same basic reason they come to a private detective. Something has gone missing, and they've run out of places to look."

A man walks out of an ordinary job in Cleveland and nobody comes looking. The address on file is a vacant lot. The emergency contact is a dead number in a town that never heard the name. His employer files a report and reassigns his claims by Friday.

One person notices. She lights a candle for him at the seven o'clock Mass, and she asks the sacristan to look - a pardoned felon who keeps the orphanage's books before nine and finds missing men after.

Brock H. Winters knows better than to take it. Grown men are allowed to disappear; he was one once. But he belongs now to a Rule of thirteen articles and a promise he has to choose again every morning at the altar rail, and the seventh article leaves him nowhere to stand.

He takes the case. In seventeen days it will cost him a boy he loves, a friend he cannot warn, and every safe assumption he ever made about who is watching whom in an American city.

The Rule has thirteen articles. Each one is a book. This is the seventh - and the first published novel of the Brock H. Winters series.