Judge Laura Porter fiercely guarded her privacy, and never more so than during her long-running—and long in the past—affair with disgraced quarterback-turned-private investigator Andy Hayes. Now she's missing, disappeared just hours after she calls Andy out of the blue explaining she's in trouble and needs his help. A trail of clues leads Andy to a central Ohio swamp whose future lies in the judge's hands as she weighs a lawsuit pitting environmentalists against developers. Soon Hayes encounters the case of another missing person, a young man who vanished without a trace in a different swamp two counties away. As he looks for links between the two disappearances, Hayes is led from Columbus to Cleveland, unearthing a history of secrets and betrayals threatening not just the judge but her family as well. Along the way, Hayes is forced to confront a newly strained relationship with his older son, now a budding football star himself, and revisit his tumultuous...

Almost two years have passed since Aaron Custer supposedly set a fire at a house in Columbus that killed three college students, including the young woman with whom he had argued just hours before. Prosecutors had an ironclad case against Custer, a convicted firebug whose fingerprints were found on the lighter that started the blaze and who quickly pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty.Private investigator and fallen Ohio State football star Andy Hayes is skeptical when Custer's grandmother asks him to reopen the investigation by finding a mysterious witness who may have seen the real culprit that night. Andy's doubts fade as he uncovers a tangle of motives for the victims' deaths, implicating the state's natural gas fracking boom, drug dealers, and more. But to delve deeper, Andy must once again make amends with his past. TV reporter Suzanne Gregory, a former fiancée, has more information on the Orton Avenue fire than any journalist in town, but asking for her help means...

It's a violent encounter that private investigator Andy Hayes could have done without. One minute he's finishing up some grocery shopping ahead of a custody visit with his sons. The next, he must come to the rescue of a Somali-American mother and her young children as anti-immigrant bullies torment them. Grateful for his intervention, the Somali community hires Andy to find a missing teenager who vanished without a trace and is now accused of plotting a terror attack in his adopted hometown of Columbus, Ohio. The government is certain that nineteen-year-old Abdi Mohamed followed in the footsteps of his brother, who died in Syria a few months earlier in a jihadi assault. But Mohamed's family isn't convinced, describing a soccer-loving American kid who renounced his brother's actions and planned to attend college in the fall and become a diplomat someday. Soon Andy is fending off fed-up FBI agents and dueling with a mysterious foe with links to the white supremacist...