As Van Dorn private detective Isaac Bell strives to land a government contract to investigate John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, the case takes a deadly turn. A sniper begins murdering opponents of Standard Oil, and soon the assassin kills Bell's best witness. Then the shooter detonates an explosion that sets the victim's independent refinery ablaze. Who is the assassin and for who did he kill? But the murders have just begun as Bell tracks his adversary from the "oil fever" regions of Kansas and Texas to Washington, D.C., to New York, to the Caspian Sea, and back to America for a final, desperate confrontation.