Lady Madeleine Jameson, a struggling heiress, arrives at the door of Barrister William Snopes in a last-ditch effort to save her faltering estate. She invested in the acquisition of a merchant brig, the Padget, allowed by a letter of marque from the king's regent to legally capture cargo from French traders operating illegally in the Indian Sea. Yet when the ship returns to the London harbor, it's met by constables and soldiers ready to seize its goods, accusing the sailors of piracy. And the letter proving their legality has disappeared. William Snopes cautiously takes the case. But as he gets deeper into the mystery and prepares for trial, he learns that the forces arrayed against Lady Jameson, and now himself, are even more powerful than he'd imagined.

Ian Wells is an ambitious Minneapolis attorney struggling to build up a law practice while caring for a mother with Alzheimer's. He is nearing the breaking point when everything changes with a single new case, and the money is too good to give up. Ian warily accepts the job, but is quickly dragged deep into a mystery linking the trust money to an illegal enterprise dating back to Prohibition and the greatest unsolved crime in Minnesota history. He soon finds himself the target of a swiftly tightening criminal investigation --- realizing too late that this so-called simple job has spun out of control and now threatens his career, his future and his life.

Kieran Mullaney survives a nuclear blast, but his attempts to discover what really happened are met with silence and threats. Convinced that Hanford Nuclear Facility is hiding something, Kieran reconnects with his old friend, lawyer Emily Hart, and enlists her help in finding out the truth. But the deeper the two of them dig, the stranger --- and more dangerous --- this case gets.