Given a chance to salvage his law enforcement career, Dona Ana County
Sheriff's Detective Clayton Istee catches a bizarre late-night double
homicide at a Las Cruces hotel. Both victims, a man and a woman, have
been scalped with their throats cut.
The murders show all the signs of a signature hit, but national and
state crime databases reveal no similar profiles. Digging into the
victims' backgrounds, Clayton discovers that six months prior the couple
had walked out of a nearby casino with $200,000 of a high-stakes
gambler's money.
He also learns the crime had been hushed up by an undercover federal DEA
agent, who resurfaces and recruits Clayton for a dangerous mission to
seize the Mexican drug lord responsible for the killings.
Thrust into the nightmare world of borderland drug wars and corrupt
cops, Clayton duels with a cunning assassin poised to kill him and his
family in a ferocious climax to the Kevin Kerney series that is sure to
stun.