After thirteen years as a homicide detective, his wife dead, and his best friend shot in a robbery, Sean O’Brien feels like he’s been through a war. He leaves the streets of Miami for a simpler life on the banks of the St. Johns River near the Ocala National Forest. What he discovers there, however, opens a dark door to something more frightening than anything he ever investigated in Miami.

O’Brien has bought an old, rundown home and begun repairs when he sees a man walking chest-deep in the nearby alligator-infested river. The man is holding a pole, searching for something. Soon afterward, O’Brien finds a young woman hidden near the river, and she’s clinging to life. She whispers something cryptic in his ear.

O’Brien made a promise to his dead wife, Sherri, that he was through with crime investigation. It was a promise he meant to keep. When he makes a second promise to the brutally beaten girl, it’s one he believes the local authorities will keep. Since the victim is a “nobody,” he finds he can’t count on them to pursue justice. Torn between his two promises, O’Brien is irrevocably plunged into the cold, lethal world of human trafficking and sexual slavery, where a brilliant killer believes he is working for the greater good, and will alter his evil plan to include O’Brien.

Tom Lowe’s debut is at once captivating and terrifying, harkening a bold new voice in crime fiction.