Cut loose from his former life at the coroner’s office, Clay Edison has set up shop as a private investigator. It’s steady, safe work. Until it isn’t. The trouble begins when a young man, tasked with managing his grandmother’s estate, hires Clay to examine some minor financial discrepancies. What starts off as a case of simple fraud rapidly explodes into a web of deception, an elaborate con game stretching back decades and involving countless victims. All the evidence points to a tiny town on California’s rugged, remote Lost Coast. Good luck getting there, though. Clay’s reward for surviving the journey is a trigger-happy welcoming committee, ready to guard their secrets with lethal force. The price of truth will turn out to be higher --- and deadlier --- than he could have imagined.

A raging wildfire. A massive blackout. A wealthy man shot to death in his palatial hilltop home. For Clay Edison, it’s all in a day’s work. As a deputy coroner, caring for the dead, he speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves. He prides himself on an unflinching commitment to the truth. Even when it gets him into trouble. Then, while working the murder scene, Clay is horrified to discover a link to his brother, Luke, who is fresh out of prison and struggling to stay on the straight and narrow. And now he’s gone AWOL. The race is on for Clay to find him before anyone else can. Confronted with Luke’s legacy of violence, he is forced to reckon with his own suspicions, resentments and loyalties.

Clay Edison has his hands full. He has a new baby who won't sleep and is working the graveyard shift. Then comes the first call. Workers demolishing a local park have made a haunting discovery: the decades-old skeleton of a child. But whose? And how did it get there? No sooner has Clay begun to investigate than he receives a second call --- this one from a local businessman, wondering if the body could belong to his sister. She went missing fifty years ago, the man says. Or at least I think she did. It’s a little complicated. Clay’s relentless search for answers will unearth a history of violence and secrets, revolution and betrayal. Because in this town, the past isn’t dead. It’s very much alive. And it can be murderous.

A wild party in a gentrifying East Bay neighborhood. A heated argument that spills into the street. Gunshots. Chaos. For Clay Edison and his fellow coroners, it’s the start of a long night and the first of many to come. The victims keep piling up. Then the smoke clears and the real mystery emerges --- one victim’s death doesn’t match the others. And it falls to Clay to give her a name and a voice. Haunted by the cruelty of her death, he embarks upon a journey into the bizarre, entering a hidden world where innocence and perversity meet and mingle. There, his relentless pursuit of the truth opens the gateway to a dark and baffling past --- and brings him right into the line of fire.

A corpse lying at the bottom of the stairs. A beautiful but troubled young woman. A brutal, decades-old murder. And the man charged with making sense of it all. Clay Edison is a former star athlete turned coroner’s investigator. It’s his job to care for the dead and the people they leave behind. It’s not his job to solve mysteries. But some cases --- and some people --- can’t be resisted. What he discovers will set him on a quest to overturn a hideous injustice, no matter the consequences.

It’s been more than a year since LAPD detective Jacob Lev learned the remarkable truth about his family, and he’s not coping well. He’s back to drinking, he’s not talking to his father, the LAPD Special Projects Department continues to shadow him, and the memory of a woman named Mai haunts him day and night. While Jacob has tried to build a bridge to his mother, she remains a stranger to him, imprisoned inside her own tattered mind. Then he comes across the file for a gruesome unsolved murder that brings the two halves of his life into startling collision.

Newly reassigned to a Special Projects squad he didn’t even know existed, Detective Jacob Lev is sent to a murder scene far up in the hills of Hollywood Division. There is no body, only an unidentified head lying on the floor of a house. Seared into a kitchen counter nearby is a single word: the Hebrew for justice. All that Detective Lev has believed to be true will be upended --- and not only his world, but the world itself, will be changed.

Arthur Pfefferkorn is a middle-aged college professor with long-dead literary aspirations. When his oldest friend, bestselling thriller writer William de Vallèe, is lost at sea, Pfefferkorn is torn between envy and grief, for de Vallèe not only outshone him professionally, but married the woman he also loved. Pfefferkorn's decision to reconnect with de Vallèe’s widow plunges him into a shadowy realm of double crosses and intrigue.

Medical student Jonah Stem accidentally stumbles across a murder in progress: a woman is being stabbed to death in the middle of the sidewalk. Without thinking, he rushes in to protect her --- inadvertently killing her attacker in the process. Thrust into the media spotlight and crushed by guilt, Jonah quickly learns that heroism isn't all it's cracked up to be.