Private investigator Elvis Cole enlists his partner and confidant Joe Pike, and Los Angeles police detective Carol Starkey in an increasingly dangerous search for the truth, when an unidentified man dies from a gunshot wound shortly after telling officers he is Cole's long-sought father.

Working as a bodyguard for a spoiled federal witness, Joe Pike hatches a desperate plan to disappear with the woman in the underworld of Los Angeles and turn on her would-be killers, an effort in which he enlists the help of private investigator Elvis Cole.

Having cleared a man of a murder charge three years earlier, Elvis Cole and his sideick, Joe Pike, find themselves on trial when the former defendant is found dead holding photographs of the victim he had been accused of killing.

Elvis Cole's taciturn partner, Joe Pike, investigates an attack on former associate Frank Meyer, a one-time mercenary whose family has been murdered by a professional hit crew and who police suspect has been keeping a dangerous secret.

Devastated by the murder of his estranged police officer son on the day of his own release from prison, former bank robber Max Holman launches a renegade investigation and discovers that the chief suspect, is being wrongfully targeted by the LAPD.

In Los Angeles, PI Elvis Cole is hired by a TV star, an adopted child, to find her biological parents for information on the family's medical history. The assignment takes him to Louisiana where he stumbles onto an illegal immigration ring.

"A brilliant new crime novel from the beloved, bestselling, and award-winning master of the genre--and Joe Pike's most perilous case to date. Joe Pike didn't expect to rescue a woman that day. He went to the bank same as anyone goes to the bank, and returned to his Jeep. So when Isabel Roland, the lonely young teller who helped him, steps out of the bank on her way to lunch, Joe is on hand when two men abduct her. Joe chases them down, and the two...

When the police tell a wealthy industrialist that her missing son has faked his own kidnapping, she hires Elvis Cole and Joe Pike-and Cole soon determines that it was no fake. The boy and his secret girlfriend have been taken, and are now lost in the gray and changing world of the professional border kidnappers who prey not only on innocent victims but also on one another-buying, selling, and stealing victims like commodities. Fortunately, the kidnappers...