Federal agents prepare to storm the Northern California hide-a-way of a drug lord. Little goes right and attorney Luke Garrison is hired as a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of the fiasco. This story starts out rather slowly but grows on you. I read it over several days and found, that when I wasn't reading it, I was wondering about what would happen next when I got back to it. This, to me, is the true mark of a good book. ( )

Excellent mystery, many twist & turns. ( )

This book starts strongly! The scene at the diner during the sand storm in the first 45 pages is tough enough! But then... it really bogged down for me, and quite frankly, bored me. Sadly, I even guessed "who done it" right away. Boo. ( )

Luke Garrison is a former district attorney of Santa Barbara County, California. He’s also a hero, having saved a group of stranded travelers from two desperadoes during the middle of a sandstorm. He’s now in private practice, having renounced prosecutorial duties to become a defense attorney after having prosecuted, and sent to the gas chamber, an innocent man. Nora, the widow of an old friend, and now state’s attorney in a rural northern California county, pleaded with Luke to accept the role of special prosecutor in a difficult case. A recent DEA attack on a drug lord’s compound went seriously awry. The drug lord, Caesar Juarez, has been killed, after he had been taken into custody only to be shot after having escaped handcuffs and being locked in the DEA’s command center at the site of the raid. Nora and Tom Miller, the county sheriff and ex-FBI agent, believe the DEA’s investigation of the matter to be seriously flawed, so they want an outside investigation. Reluctantly, Luke agrees. His efforts are sidetracked as Nora repeatedly comes on to him, despite his staunch refusal to succumb. He hires a staff, and soon evidence is uncovered, with the help of Sheriff Miller, that implicates the lead agent, Sterling Jerome, of the attack on the compound. It seems, Sterling’s sister had been in love with Juarez many years before. The idea that his sister might marry a Hispanic enraged the Jeromes and they beat Juarez within an inch of his life. Sterling had been after Juarez ever since, but this was unknown to the DEA. Other incriminating evidence appears, including a $500,000 wire transfer into Sterling’s Florida bank account. The case appears to be air-tight, but as the trial progresses, some bizarre facts emerge, dug up by one of Luke’s investigators. It seems, Miller and Nora both built very expensive houses at the same time that the drug lord’s compound was being built, and they all had the same architect. The source of the money to pay for their houses is very murky, and to complicate matters further, it appears Juarez may have been using a nearby Indian reservation to launder drug money. Luke is faced with the dilemma of how to handle exculpatory evidence in what seems to be a certain conviction. The trial scenes are great. ( )