Deep in the heart of winter, things are beginning to shift for the Zoo Crew. Drake Bell is wrapping up his last days in law school and preparing to take the bar exam. Kade Keuhl has finally relented and agreed to apply for his private investigator's license. The ski lift at the local Snow Plaza has grounded everybody from hitting the slopes. And Emily, Drake's former college flame, is back in town looking to make him an offer that could alter everything moving forward.
A hundred miles east of Missoula, just outside of Butte, the mansion of reclusive billionaire Wes Koenig is burned to the ground. A radical new accelerant is used to reduce the place to rubble in a fraction of expected time, leaving local law enforcement stumped and heightening the impetus to apprehend whoever is responsible.
Working under the constraints of expectations and growing unrest, a much deep story unfolds than anybody anticipated. What started as a simple case of arson soon begins to stretch back a decade in length, encompassing land deals gone bad, deep personal ideologies, and activism taken to its ugly extreme.
Things are beginning to evolve for the Zoo Crew. Drake Bell has passed the bar exam, accepted a new position, and begun a new phase of his legal career. His first case to walk through the door is in defense of a young woman that was the driver in an accident that left a young cyclist in the hospital. She accepts her guilt, but something about her story strikes a chord with Drake, causing him to dig a little deeper.
What starts as an attempt to shield the young woman from the misguided crusade of a prosecutor serving ulterior motives soon begins to shift, taking things in a direction that Drake never could have anticipated. Within days he finds himself on a quest that is part medical mystery and part history lesson, trying in earnest to understand the condition afflicting his patient and what it means for the situation she now finds herself in.
Again armed with the myriad skills of the Crew, he begins to uncover a trail that stretches back more than 100 years, involving some of the oldest wealth and industry in the state, and those that would do anything to continue protecting it.
Two weeks ago, Lukas Webb was an Army sniper on the front lines in Afghanistan. Upon finding out his father has just days to live, he is granted a compassionate discharge and returns home to Hamilton, Montana to say goodbye and take over the family business. Just days into his tenure at the helm of the WB Ranch, he appears at the front door of an Agriculture Commission meeting carrying a rifle and fires two perfect shots before being taking three rounds himself.
While Lukas sits in Hamilton Memorial Hospital in a medical-induced coma, a frenzy wages on outside. Local law enforcement and prosecutors parade in front of the cameras, blaming the actions on a maladjusted serviceman, using the incident to bolster their own standing. Veterans in the area bristle at the treatment, threatening to lash back at any time. Townspeople claim they no longer feel safe on the streets of Hamilton.
With just days remaining before Lukas wakes and is hauled off to prison for the rest of his life, a call is made to budding attorney Drake Bell for assistance. Employing the help of his friends the Zoo Crew, he begins a maddening search for the real reason behind the shooting, something he suspects resonates much closer to home . . .
Bargain Mart, long a fixture in the Missoula economic structure has fallen on hard times. Things are dire, and if a financial windfall doesn't arrive soon, their doors will close.
Across town, a woman grieves her recently deceased husband. Sitting alone at her kitchen table trying to put her life back in order, a call arrives asking where his quarter million dollar life insurance policy should be sent. A quarter million dollar life insurance policy she never knew existed.
Answering the phone on the other end of her call for help is Drake Bell, third year law student at the University of Montana. Joined by his partner Ava, and his loyal friends the Zoo Crew, Drake must attempt to make sense of the case Alice presents him.
A case that only grows more complex as people continue to pass in Missoula, all with ties to Bargain Mart, all with large life insurance policies attached to them. Policies known in the corporate world as Dead Peasants . . .
The Zoo Crew. A random assortment of individuals that came together in western Montana out of circumstance, stayed together by choice. Among them are Ajax, a gaming genius far from his native Boston. Kade, a forest firefighter that spends half his year roaming the blazing countryside, the other half perusing the local nightlife. Sage, registered nurse and proverbial mother hen for the group.
At the helm is Drake Bell, displaced Southerner and third year law student. Fresh off a summer spent interning in legal hell, he is only mildly certain he even wants to continue down the path he's on. Until an old friend comes to find him that is.
Eight months pregnant and closing fast on her due date, the girl is scared. What was supposed to have been a simple surrogacy agreement has gone tragically wrong. Young girls like her are coming up missing or even worse. She's on the run and has nobody else to turn to.
If everything the girl is saying is true, some of the largest players in the Missoula community are involved. Armed only with his own trepidations and the loyalty of those around him, Drake must find a way to save his friend and his own growing skepticism before it's too late.
Three years ago, Ham retired to a quiet life in the remote desert of Northern Mexico.
Realizing what she was doing would likely end in her death, she severed all ties, disappearing across international borders.
Her retirement ended abruptly with a single message. The sole person in the world Ham feels the least bit of loyalty to is in trouble, in need not only of Ham but of the very skills that put her into hiding.
Acting against every ingrained maxim, and ignoring the myriad warning signs popping up along the way, Ham returns north to find a great deal has changed in her time away. The world moved on, evolving in ways she would have never imagined. From local gang affiliates to the Los Angeles Police Department, everybody seems to be involved in something, all of it somehow leading back to a woman.
A woman relying entirely on Ham to get her through . . .
Just months before Hawaii's gubernatorial primary election, a body is found on the floor of the open air capitol, a macabre scene specifically manipulated to draw attention to a sitting governor with waning political support. Frantic, he calls on the Honolulu Chief of Police Walter Tseng, demanding that the perpetrator be brought to justice as swiftly and silently as possible, fearful a scandal might destroy whatever chance he still has at gaining re-election.
Blackmailed into complicity and unable to draw from his active force, Tseng calls in Kalani Lewis, a young detective three months off the job. Still battling her own demons from an investigation that resulted in the death of her partner, Kalani is forced back into action, pulled into a life she isn't certain she still wants to be a part of, a family friend that was once a military policeman and now a full-time surfer as her only support.
Inch by inch they work their way through the investigation, navigating mounting crime scenes and intense bureaucratic pressures as the election looms ever closer, the killer growing more emboldened by the day . . .
For the last six years, Tim Scarberry has called Portland, Oregon home. Placed there by the Witness Protection Program, he has assimilated into the existence set up for him, trying to gain some level of enjoyment from the life he never asked for and even less wanted.
An existence that is completely destroyed by a single phone call, nothing more than a message telling him that his last remaining tether to his old life has been severed in a most tragic and unexpected way.
Having no choice but to abandon his adopted life and return to his roots, Scarberry finds himself dropped into a situation far more harrowing than he ever could have imagined. Allied with a single sheriff's deputy-a young woman he knew only briefly in his youth that is fighting battles of her own-the two face a network of illegal gun runners, apathetic bureaucracy, and federal agency, ultimately squaring off with the very thing Scarberry's been trying to avoid for so long . . .
A boy of just six years old, Austin Roberts found himself perpetually in the way at the post-funeral gathering of his great uncle Jack. Frustrated and alone, he wandered out onto the front porch to find his great uncle Cat, Jack's brother, sitting alone, an old album on his lap. Oblivious to the world around them, the two begin an unlikely conversation and together embark on a journey that stretches almost seven decades in length.
Page by page, Cat imparts the story of the album to young Austin, using a series of seemingly mundane and unconnected objects to tell the story of the brothers Roberts from long ago. Beginning with their humble upbringing by a single mother on the river bottoms of rural Ohio to the day they left home to serve in the Korean War, through their capture and escape from an unmarked prisoner of war camp and on through the lives they returned to, the album tells a story of bravery and brotherhood that knows no bounds.
Two days ago, Eric Winston was about to be a made man. As the head of Mjollnir Industries he had operated at the forefront of the criminal underworld for over three decades and was finally getting his chance to join the big leagues. An international conglomerate of businessmen and government officials that come together to form one of the largest drug rings in existence. Winston's final task before being officially brought on board? Host a one-night, winner-take-all event featuring the best underground fighters in the world. Everything was in order, until a competitor had to back out . . .
Two days ago, Will Honeycutt was an anonymous Portland firefighter, doing his best to provide for his young family. When the St. Rita's Orphanage burned to the ground and he pulled a half dozen children to safety, he inadvertently thrust himself into the public eye. Now, accompanied by local surgeon and brother Heath, Will sets off to begrudgingly attend a banquet in his honor.
Two days ago, FBI special agent Mike Manus was doggedly working the case that had killed his father nearly three decades before. When a call comes in that could finally unlock the puzzle he's been trying to solve his entire career, he boards a plane in pursuit of what he hopes will finally be absolution.
Detective Reed Mattox, just three months removed from the death of his partner, has turned invisibility into an art form. Switching to the K-9, taking over the graveyard shift, moving to a farmhouse miles outside of Columbus, his every move has become predicated on putting as much distance between himself and the outside world as possible. That distance is shattered, though, when bodies begin turning up in The Bottoms, the poverty-stricken section of town he is assigned to patrol. Grisly, horrific scenes start to pop up in the middle of the night and the overburdened precinct has no choice but to put Reed on it. Now operating far outside of his comfort zone with a Belgian Malinois for a partner that attracts attention wherever they go, Reed is forced to unravel the murders, taking him clear across the city and back years in time, to an event that some very influential people will do anything to keep buried.
Felix "O" O'Connor is an ex-con from central Ohio who has spent the last seven years working on a ranch in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. Rarely does he venture out into the world and never does it come looking for him. Both of those things change when his twin sister, Alexa "Lex" Borden, calls from Columbus, Ohio, to ask for his help. Earlier that afternoon, she and her husband were both beaten unconscious, and their two-year-old daughter was abducted from their front yard. Nobody saw a thing, the police are stumped, and it is a well-known statistic that if a child isn't found in the first forty-eight hours, they rarely are.
O immediately drives back to Ohio and finds himself with just twenty-one hours to find his beloved niece before potentially losing her forever. Plunging himself into a world he'd long ago left behind, he crosses paths with criminal masterminds, human traffickers, gun runners, drug smugglers, bloodthirsty spectators, and suspicious detectives, all in the name of bringing her home.
