While trying to solve one of Florida’s most profound secrets, Doc Ford is the target of a murder attempt by someone who wants to make it look like an accident. Or is the target actually his friend, Tomlinson? What their small family of friends don’t know is that their secret pasts make it impossible for the two of them to go to the law for help. There is an assassin on the loose, and it is up to them to find the killer --- before he (or she) finishes the job.

A woman is discovered hanged in a hotel room in Gothenburg, Sweden. Chief Inspector Erik Winter wonders whether her family is holding back some secret that might help identify the murderer. At the same time, Winter becomes convinced that there may be a connection between this crime and one of his first cases as a young detective that concerned a young woman who disappeared --- from the same room in the same hotel.

Leo Maxwell’s older brother Teddy, a successful yet reviled criminal defense attorney, has been shot and lies in a coma. Leo quickly realizes that the list of possible suspects is much larger than he could have imagined. The deeper he digs into Teddy’s life, the more questions arise. Somewhere, the person who shot his brother is still on the loose, and there are many who would happily kill Leo in order to keep it that way.

Butch Roberson, a hardworking, upright local business owner, is accused of murdering two EPA employees. As the manhunt organized itself, Joe heard about the tract of land Butch and his wife had bought to build their retirement home on, until the EPA declared it a wetland. It was an awful story. But was it the whole story? The more Joe looks into it, the more he finds himself in the middle of a war he never expected and never wanted.

Genevieve has finally escaped the stressful demands of her sales job and begun a new life aboard a houseboat in Kent. Not many people know that she financed her fresh start by working weekends as a dancer at a less-than-reputable gentlemen's club, and she's determined to keep it that way. But on the night of her housewarming party, the past intrudes when a body washes up beside the boat, and Genevieve recognizes the victim as a fellow dancer.

LA burglar Junior Bender is being bullied into proving that aging music industry mogul Vinnie DiGaudio is innocent of the murder of a nasty tabloid journalist he had threatened to kill. It doesn’t help that the dead journalist’s pretty widow is trying to get Junior to mix pleasure with business. Just as the investigation is spiraling out of control, Junior's hard-drinking landlady begs him to solve the disappearance of her daughter, who got involved with a very questionable character.

Dick Henry --- aka the Shortcut Man --- becomes involved in a case featuring aging movie mogul Howard Hogue, who keeps a stable of young starlets available for his highly ritualized attentions. After Hogue’s star director assaults one of these women in a drug-fueled romp, Henry is drawn into a deeper mystery from years past involving a mysterious death on a boat and a missing screenplay written by what appears to be a homeless man.

When Brigid Quinn retired early from the FBI, she thought she could put all her horrible memories of hunting sexual predators behind her. Wanting nothing more than a quiet life with her new husband and their dogs, she moves to Tucson and begins to settle in. However, when Floyd Lynch confesses to the worst of her unsolved crimes and the new FBI agent on the case thinks the confession is fake, Brigid is pulled back into the world she thought she left behind.