"'I realized I didn’t want any part of believing my parents were murdered. I’d grown comfortable with the old narrative, however false and however bad. I was the illegitimate child of a junky mother, orphaned by her addiction. Maybe Pops was right to let sleeping dogs lie.'
Benjamin Joel was a fatherless eleven-year-old boy when he found his mother dead of a heroin overdose in a run-down Kansas trailer home. Doing his best to shutter away her memory and his own violent past, Ben is now an attorney trying to make a life for himself and his family. While investigating a case for a client accused of murdering an ex-cop, a strung out flesh peddler named Ricky Butler tells Ben he’s the spitting image of a guy Ben has never heard of named Paco Correa. Ben shrugs off the comment as the ramblings of a burnout until Butler references the death of Ben’s mother twenty-eight years earlier in shockingly familiar terms, claiming she and Correa were murdered by dirty cops. Ben’s search for the truth about the death of his mother and a father he never knew drags him back into the dark recesses of his past and puts him in the crosshairs of a ruthless sex trafficking ring."
"After a drug cartel abducts his sister, a Kansas judge puts everything on the line to find her.
Judge Benjamin Joel catches a death penalty case involing a local drug dealer with ties to a Mexican cartel. When his sister is abducted three days before the trial, Ben is told what he must do to save her--cut the defendant loose utilizing a seldom-used judicial tool known as a judgment of acquittal. A call to law enforcement would expose a conflict of interest that would disqualify him from the case and get his sister killed, so Ben plunges into the trial of his life by day, and the dark underworld of the drug trade by night with the aid of only a few trusted allies."
