It's winter in the Oregon wine country, and small-town lawyer Cal Claxton deserves a respite after his last grueling case. But just as the world learns about a threatening new virus variant, a woman named Willow Daniels shows up at his office, asking Cal to represent her in the settlement of her uncle's estate. His death was ruled a suicide, but Willow isn't buying it. Cal soon learns that the uncle, a brilliant scientist, recently came up with an innovative device to detect viruses. The expected payoff is huge, and the list of those who stand to gain from his death gets longer and longer. Cal finds himself immersed in one of the most complex and dangerous cases he's ever investigated. When a key witness is brutally murdered, and the woman Cal loves falls ill, he realizes he's up against two killers --- a ruthless murderer and a deadly virus.

Running a one-man law practice in the heart of Oregon's wine country, Cal Claxton hires a young, undocumented man as an assistant. Timoteo Fuentes is a bright, hardworking student by day and Cal's legal clerk by night. When one of Timoteo's family members is brutally murdered, the migrant community is reluctant to cooperate with the police investigation for fear of deportation. Devastated by the loss and nervous about engaging with the legal system, the family turns to Cal for help. With Timoteo protected as a "Dreamer" from deportation, the two begin a dangerous investigation of ruthless people who leverage the fear of a vulnerable population for profit and an assassin who is as cunning as he is deadly.

Attorney Cal Claxton, now well-established in his Oregon law practice after breaking off his career as a high-powered LA prosecutor, goes fishing with his daughter, Claire. But their vacation takes a dark turn with the discovery of a body in the river. As an investigation is launched into the suspicious death, Cal and Claire find themselves drawn into the life of the local bookshop owner and vocal environmental activist, whose grandson was convicted of murder at age 16. She believes he was wrongly accused and convinces Cal to reexamine the case. Together, Cal and Claire dig deep into the secrets and crumbling alliances that form the foundation of this small coastal community, and what they find could spell doom for them both.

Cal Claxton’s new client is the adopted daughter of a Portland power couple famed for their real estate development firm and charitable work. Sculptor Angela Wingate and her recently widowed mother, Margaret, had grown close after years of estrangement. A grieving Angela is hesitant but nonetheless determined to learn if Margaret's recent death was a hit-and-run or something more --- like murder. As the ever-curious Cal begins to poke the principal players at Wingate Properties and to question Margaret's will, links surface between a lucrative riverfront project and a ruthless Russian ring. With a possible deadly foreign assassin in play, the threat level rises and the body count starts to grow.

When former prosecutor Cal Claxton’s neighbor, Jim Kavanaugh, the owner and gifted vintner of an up-and-coming winery, is accused of murdering his wife, his freedom --- and the grape harvest --- is suddenly in jeopardy along with his reputation, and his business begins to slide. No gentleman farmer, this puts the rugged winemaker's property, his only financial asset, in play. When a blackmail plot is hatched against the owner of adjacent land, it begins to look like a brutal game of real-life Monopoly is underway. Cal agrees to defend Jim, a good friend, which pulls him reluctantly into the blackmail plot and might well make him the next target of a vicious, cunning killer.

The first closing of the floodgates of the mammoth Dalles Dam on the Columbia River inundated the sacred falls and the Native American village at Celilo, which depended on the river’s magnificent fish. Nelson Queah --- Wasco Indian, war hero and passionate opponent of the dam --- watched helplessly as 10,000 years of tribal history and fishing tradition disappeared. That 1957 night, he vanished without a trace. Fifty years later, attorney Cal Claxton attends a commemoration of the flooding of the falls where he meets Winona Cloud, Queah’s granddaughter who has found a cache of letters at her grandmother’s home, letters Queah wrote to his wife before he vanished. They suggest foul play, not an accidental drowning.