Jack H. Walters

Ken Murchison is happy. He has a good life. He and his girlfriend Kami are comfortable in small-town South Dakota, where Ken is chief operating officer at a toy manufacturing company. Everything seems to be going just as he would want until an early morning call from the police, reporting that his best friend and colleague Bobby has been brutally murdered at the company where they work.

The murder appears to have been committed during a burglary and the police focus on that angle. Ken cannot accept that Bobby was simply so unlucky as to be in his lab when burglars broke in. As he tries to figure out how this murder could have happened, he becomes obsessed with finding Bobby’s killers and, in that pursuit, starts taking chances. It takes little time for Ken to quickly get into areas that he knows nothing about and he soon finds himself swimming in a turbulent sea of liars, impostors, and spies. Fear drives him to associate with people he hates and disrespects, just as it drives him to personal behaviors that he hates and disrespects.

Ken struggles mightily to maintain his normal work responsibilities while grieving over Bobby’s death and swirling ever deeper into what could be a case of international espionage. It soon becomes apparent that Ken simply does not have the knowledge and experience to sort out what is really going on, but obsession drives him onward and plunges him ever deeper into a situation that involves people most of us are lucky never to meet.

It becomes apparent that finding Bobby’s killers is not Ken’s only challenge. He must try to hold his disintegrating life together, to keep from alienating those close to him and, ultimately, to avoid falling prey to the same evil that killed Bobby.