Disgraced, disbarred and defriended, ex-lawyer Morgan Pike is nearly bankrupt and desperate for a paycheck. She accepts the only job she's been offered in a year of looking-private investigator with a Chattanooga, Tennessee firm. Morgan has been with the company for a year. Her goal is to stay out of trouble and serve the remaining two years of her four-year suspension and return to her prior life as a defense attorney in Richmond, Virginia.Bored by divorce and insurance cases and against the advice of her boss, she becomes involved in the search for a beautiful young woman who has disappeared without a trace. The case takes her from the Blue Ridge Mountains of north Georgia to the dark underbelly of post-Katrina New Orleans and back. Her unrelenting quest for the truth propels her into terrifying clashes with members of a violent survivalist cabal in the southern Appalachian Mountains. The investigation builds to a stunning and dramatic conclusion that no one saw coming.Here is a short excerpt from the book:"Sunday morning I took my first cup of coffee and sat at the café table by the sliding doors leading to the balcony of my apartment. I pulled my robe close and leaned back from the table. Something flashed in the glass door. The left side of my face erupted with the pain of a thousand wasp stings. The door spider-webbed with cracks radiating from a small hole. I recognized the sound of a bullet snapping past my head.I sat stunned, shocked, uncomprehending. A second passed, then my body reacted. I dived for the floor just as the glass in the door disintegrated. A second bullet cracked through the room, tearing into the floor a foot from my face. A third shot blasted through the kitchen wall and smashed into the dishwasher.I scrambled on hands and knees toward the bedroom. Three more bullets ripped through the walls of the apartment. Using the bed as a shield between me and the outside wall, I reached up to the nightstand, grabbed my phone and dialed."911. What is your emergency?""Someone's shooting at me-again."
