Another exhilarating thriller from Edgar Award winner David Ellis, introducing the new series protagonist Jason Kolarich. Jason Kolarich is a midwestern Everyman with a lineman's build and an easy smart-ass remark. He's a young, intelligent maverick, but he's also struggling with an overwhelming emotional burden—one that threatens to unravel his own life, and possibly the lives of those around him.Twenty-seven years ago, two-year-old Audrey Cutler disappeared from her home in the middle of the night. She was never found. All the detectives had to go on were vague eyewitness accounts of a man running down the Cutlers' street, apparently carrying someone. Without enough evidence to suggest otherwise, Griffin Perlini—a neighbor with prior offenses against minors—was arrested, but never convicted. The case is long closed when Perlini is murdered nearly thirty years later. Now a man named Mr. Smith appears in Jason Kolarich's office, saying only that he represents a third party who wants the man charged with murder off the hook and that Kolarich is perfect for the job. The new client: Audrey Cutler's older brother, Sammy—Kolarich's estranged childhood best friend—a man he hasn't seen in nearly twenty years. But when Kolarich starts receiving violent threats from Mr. Smith's enigmatic employer, he figures out that the secrecy behind this nameless third party—and the key to winning Sammy's case—is entangled with the mystery of Audrey's disappearance. With his own life and Sammy's in the balance, Kolarich has to put aside not only the mounting anxiety of the job but also a heart-wrenching personal tragedy in order to find out what really happened to Audrey all those years ago.

Former college football star and criminal defense attorney Jason Kolarich returns in this shocking thriller from the award-winning author of The Hidden Man. Jason Kolarich has spent the past year struggling to recover from the horrific deaths of his wife and baby daughter.On the night of their deaths, Kolarich was at the office, awaiting a call from a confidential informant named Ernesto Ramirez-a call that never came. Kolarich blames himself not only for the deaths of his wife and child, but for the informant's murder as well. He can't bring back his family, but he can find out who killed Ramirez and bring the killer to justice. Unfortunately, Kolarich's guns-blazing approach to justice lands him smack in the middle of an FBI probe of a deeply corrupt governor and his cronies. To avoid jail, Kolarich must enter a world of wiretaps, double-dealing, and kickbacks, where he soon discovers that the murder of his informant was only the tip of the iceberg. This breach of trust runs up to the highest levels of power, and exposing it may drag Kolarich into the fight of his life.

When Jason Kolarich accepts the case of a homeless Iraq War veteran accused of murdering a young paralegal, his course seems clear: to mount an insanity defense for a man suffering so badly from post-traumatic stress disorder that he has no real memory of the crime. But as Kolarich digs deeper, he realizes that, unlikely as it seems, his client is probably innocent. Only days before her death, the murdered paralegal had stumbled on something she wasn't supposed to know . . . information that someone would kill to keep secret. Her murder was no random crime but a targeted hit, and the wrong man was charged.As Jason Kolarich races to discover the truth in time to save his client, he finds himself embroiled in a mystery involving the Mob, a mysterious assassin known only as “Gin Rummy,” and a conspiracy of wealthy international terrorists with explosive plans for his city. With thousands of lives at stake, Kolarich has more on the line than ever before . . . and time is running out.

Defense attorney Jason Kolarich is back in another edge-of-your-seat thriller . . . and this time he may find himself in over his head, in more ways than one. Believing he’s the target of a frame-up, geeky loner James Drinker hires defense attorney Jason Kolarich to take his case. Two women he knows have recently been murdered, seemingly by the same killer, and Drinker thinks he’ll be the police’s main suspect. Something about Drinker seems off from the start, but Kolarich doesn’t give it too much thought. Until another murder occurs. And then another.As he begins to probe his client’s life and story more closely, it quickly becomes clear that nothing about James Drinker is what it seems…and the target of the frame-up isn’t Drinker, but Kolarich. Faced with a murder charge and unable to prove his own innocence without breaking his sworn attorney-client privilege, Jason Kolarich must hunt for the truth about James Drinker, the series of brutal killings, and why he’s been set up to take the fall. The answers will be beyond anything he could have imagined.