Smokey Joe's is a fast-paced historical crime thriller set against the turmoil of America in the late 1960s.
When Marine Corporal Wally Riggs survives the Tet Offensive in Saigon, he returns home expecting to leave the war behind. Instead, he finds himself stepping into another kind of battlefield.
Recruited into the Seattle Police Department, Riggs is immediately confronted by riots, political extremism, racial tension, corruption, organized crime, and a city struggling to contain the violence spreading through its streets.
His military instincts make him an effective officer but they also make him dangerous. After a controversial incident puts his career at risk, Riggs is given an unusual choice: leave the department or work undercover as the bartender at Smokey Joe's, a tavern with connections to Seattle's criminal underworld.
What begins as an undercover assignment soon develops into something much larger. Secret intelligence, mysterious informants, stolen computers, military interests, fugitives, and a masked criminal pull Riggs into a dangerous operation stretching far beyond Seattle.
At one point, more than $40 million in IBM computer equipment becomes part of the investigation.
As Riggs moves between the worlds of law enforcement, organized crime, military intelligence, and political unrest, he must decide whom he can trust and how much of himself he is willing to sacrifice to uncover the truth.
Set during one of the most turbulent periods in American history, Smokey Joe's combines Vietnam-era military action, police procedural suspense, espionage, crime, and historical events into a sprawling thriller about a veteran trying to navigate a country that feels almost as dangerous as the war he left behind.
