Paying a harsh self-imposed penance for a terrible misstep on a case, former LAPD superstar detective Charlie Waldo lives a life of punishing minimalism deep within the woods. However, his PI girlfriend, Lorena, keeps drawing him back to civilization. When old adversary Don Q strongarms Waldo into investigating the seemingly mundane death of a vagrant, Lorena agrees he can work under her PI license on one condition: that he help with a high-maintenance celebrity client, wildly popular courtroom TV star Judge Ida Mudge, whose new mega-deal makes her a perfect target for blackmail. Reopening the coldest of cases, a decades-old fraternity death, Waldo begins to wonder if the judge is, in fact, a murderer --- and if he’ll stay alive long enough to find out.

When the teacher Stevie Rose claims seduced her turns up dead, the LAPD pegs her as the prime suspect. Then Stevie disappears, and her self-involved Hollywood parents turn to former LAPD detective Charlie Waldo to find her --- a task that draws him down into Orange County’s dangerous and complex worlds, where nothing is as it seems. With treachery and deception at every turn, and with Waldo’s eco-obsessed rules for living complicating his already complicated relationship with his PI ex-girlfriend, Lorena, Waldo fends off enemies old and new as he races to find Stevie and solve the murder.

Former detective Charlie Waldo now lives in solitude deep in the woods. He has left behind his career and his girlfriend, Lorena, to pay self-imposed penance for an awful misstep on an old murder case. But the old ghosts are about to come roaring back. Alastair Pinch is a onetime Royal Shakespeare Company thespian who now slums it as the "wise" Southern judge on a tacky network show. He's absurdly rich, often belligerent and typically drunk --- a damning combination when Alastair's wife is found dead on their living room floor and he can't remember what happened. Waldo's old flame Lorena, hiding peril of her own, draws him toward the case, and Alastair's greedy network convinces Waldo to take it on.