Crown's Justice

The naked woman washed up onto the gritty sand right in front of Sam Crown’s beach house.

And so begins another adventure for private eye Sam Crown, a former highly-decorated U.S. Marine and cop. “Must be my lucky day,” he grinned. But he was wrong. He gets involved with a murder trial that has a mobbed-up defendant and the jurors keep disappearing. The naked woman turns out to be one of the missing jurors but she has amnesia and can’t remember who she is or how she got in the ocean.

P.I. Sam Crown and his wife Bo — the former FBI agent turned P.I. and attorney — open up Crown Investigations in Capistrano Beach, California. Adopted daughter Becky, the 17-year-old super genius who teaches particle physics at UCI, designs expensive gadgets for the military complex in an office down the hall.

While investigating why the jurors keep disappearing, Sam learns that the “new Las Vegas” mob is making a push to bring their style of gambling to Orange County. They already have a fleet of gambling “cruises” operating off the California coast. Enter the enigmatic Tony Bracco, the Executive Vice President of Entertainment Enterprises, a Las Vegas-based company that owns hotels, casinos, and gambling ships. Sam and Bracco don’t like each other from their first meeting.

Before the smoke clears, Sam administers his own brand of justice when once again the established system fails. When his wife Bo wants to know what he is planning, his enigmatic answer is, “I learned in ’Nam that there are certain things that are best not shared with anyone. The difference between a Medal of Honor and a firing squad is as thin as a razor’s edge.”

And when explaining his motive for involving himself with other people’s problems, he says, “I’ve just always had this primordial urge to protect crime victims — something the so-called justice system doesn’t do. They’re too busy making sure they don’t violate the criminals’ rights.”

Follow Sam, Bo, and Becky on another rip-roaring adventure through the mean streets of Orange County and the decks of a gambling ship.