A second jury in a cold case murder trial is struggling to reach a verdict against a confirmed serial rapist despite damning evidence. Why?
Jedidiah “Jed” Bouvier, a weary idealist and recovering alcoholic, is defending Dexter Wayne Jones, who is a copycat of the infamous Golden State Killer. Jones is on trial for slaughtering a family decades earlier. Evidence of his guilt is overwhelming.
And yet—a first jury couldn’t agree on a verdict.
Jed and his co-counsel, Tara Singh, battled relentless prosecutor Catalina “Cat” Galvez in the high-stakes retrial, but sinister forces are moving behind the scenes. A juror from the first trial is murdered; another disappears. Jed’s neighbor, a hulking ex-cop with a dark secret, seems peculiarly interested in the proceedings.
Tensions are high as the second jury becomes hopelessly deadlocked. Meanwhile, Jed’s girlfriend, a beautiful woman with a stunning secret of her own, mysteriously vanishes.
Will a killer walk free?
Set in fictional Murrieta County, California, north of Sacramento, what begins as a legal drama explodes in a terrifying descent into moral ambiguity, as Jed uncovers the identity of the woman he loves—and the nightmarish truth about the price of idealism in a broken system.