Phil Broker

For his exciting novels, Chuck Logan is receiving critical acclaim as a master of suspense. In this work, he crafts an intricate thriller that carries you from the busy newsroom of a St. Paul paper to the inner circles of the Witness Protection Program. When down-on-his-luck reporter, Tom James, gets a mysterious tip about an FBI investigation, he decides to find and question the informant on his own. This might be the break he needs to revive his career. The story he gets from her, though, is much bigger than he expects: it leads to a 2 million-dollar stash. Tom is no hero. Now he has the money and is the one with secrets to keep. Tightly-plotted and intense, The Big Law follows the deals and double deals that ripple around the cash. With his flawless timing, narrator Richard Ferrone keeps the scenes moving at a swift pace.

On one of the coldest nights in Minnesota history, the difference between life and death is literally the blink of an eye for Phil Broker, until recently St. Paul's most successful undercover cop. That blink will convey the urgent warning of a comatose man who knows the dark truth binding Broker to a remarkable cast of characters -- a weary anesthesiologist, a brilliant surgeon, a wealthy novelist, his ex-wife (a reformed exotic dancer) and her unrepentant pimp. For Broker it all began when he agreed to take three big-city professionals on a canoeing trip across Minnesota's most remote lakes. One of the three is horribly injured in a freak October blizzard, and Broker embarks on a white-knuckle rescue against time and the elements, ending with a writer in a coma and his accountant dead. Suspicious of foul play, Broker follows a twisted trail of manipulation and revenge that leads back to the writer's beautiful wife -- and a ring of men caught in a deadly competition for her affections.

Nina Pryce and her husband, Phil Broker, couldn't have more opposite views of the military. Broker's loyalty to the men he served with in Vietnam is matched only by his certainty that they shouldn't have been there in the first place. Nina is a new breed, a decorated and ambitious vet of the first Gulf War. Incommunicado for months as part of a top-secret Delta anti-terrorist operation, Nina suddenly emerges in a town in the heart of the old Minuteman II missile belt. When Broker arrives, he immediately discovers that the legacy of those warheads still casts a sinister shadow across the desolate north border country, in the person of a damaged psychopath. Broker discovers he's been drawn into an elaborate con within a con and made an unwitting participant in a black-bag anti-terrorist detail. But his anger toward Nina for involving him and putting their daughter at risk quickly fades as a larger, more deadly reality becomes evident. With time running out, husband and wife unite with local North Dakota law enforcement to form a last line of defense against a brilliantly simple act of espionage with potentially catastrophic consequences. Performed by Kevin Conway

Reunited with estranged husband and undercover cop Phil Broker, Nina Pryce takes an extended medical leave from the army to recover from the injuries-physical and psychological-she sustained at the hands of a vicious psychopath. The Broker/Pryce household relocates to a remote resort town of Glacier Falls, MN, where daughter Kit is enrolled in second grade at the local elementary school. Everyone assumes that Kit is adjusting well-until she punches Terry Clump, the terror of the second grade, in the face. He gets a bloody nose and she gets suspended. What begins as a seemingly minor spat between innocent kids quickly escalates into a vicious scenario of lawlessness and provocation. Kit's imitation of her parents' violent proclivities has put them all in harm's way: the Clumps are but one-half of a notoriously vengeful "clan" known for criminal behavior and brutal violence.