Hiram W. Holland

April 2011: On a remote mountaintop overlooking the remains of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, Azad Ashani witnesses a Quds Force demonstration of a capability meant to upend America’s war in the Middle East. Ashani, director of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security and Irene Kennedy’s former back channel to the Iranian government, recognizes the demonstration’s true significance, and the nation-ending conflict it will provoke. Alone, Ashani stands no chance of preventing this rush to madness.

A day before the three Pickett girls come home for Thanksgiving, Marybeth Pickett finds an unmarked package at the front door of the library where she works. When she opens the package, she finds a photo album that belonged to an infamous Nazi official. Who left it there? And why did they leave it with her?

When Earl Alden is found dead, dangling from a wind turbine, it's his wife, Missy, who is arrested. Unfortunately for Joe Pickett, Missy is his mother-in- law, a woman he dislikes heartily, and now he doesn't know what to do-especially when the early signs point to her being guilty as sin. But then things happen to make Joe wonder: Is Earl's death what it appears to be? Is Missy being set up? He has the county DA and sheriff on one side, his wife on the other, his estranged friend Nate on a lethal mission of his own, and some powerful interests breathing down his neck.

It's an idyllic late-summer day in Saddlestring, Wyoming, and game warden Joe Pickett is fly-fishing with his two daughters when he stumbles upon the mutilated body of a moose. Whatever - or whoever - attacked the animal was ruthless: half the animal's face has been sliced away, the skin peeled back from the flesh. Shaken by the sight, Joe starts to investigate what he hopes in an isolated incident.

In 1980, a freshman congressman was gunned down in Rhode Island, sending shockwaves through Washington that are still reverberating over four decades later. Now, with the world on the brink of war and a weakened United States facing rampant inflation, political division, and shocking assassinations, a secret cabal of global elites is ready to assume control. And with the world’s most dangerous man locked in solitary confinement, the conspirators believe the final obstacle to complete domination has been eliminated. They’re wrong.

Santa Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney and his wife, Lieutenant Colonel Sara Brannon, are on leave and eagerly awaiting the birth of their son when a prominent gay attorney is gunned down outside his office by an unknown assailant. Called to the crime scene and faced with scanty evidence and no apparent motive, Kerney directs his chief of detectives to delve into the victim's personal and professional life, a decision that ultimately leads to a SWAT team screw-up and the death of two innocent people.