Jason Kolarich

On a hot summer night in 1980, two-year-old Audrey Culter was snatched from her bedroom and never seen again. Twenty-six years later, her brother, Sammy, fatefully crosses paths with the man the police failed to convict for her abduction and murder. A few weeks later, that man is dead, murdered. Private attorney Jason Kolarich is engaged to defend Audrey's brother. But can he trust the people who hired him?

Jason Kolarich has spent the past year struggling to recover from the horrific deaths of his wife and baby daughter. On the night of their deaths, Kolarich was at the office, awaiting a call from a confidential informant named Ernesto Ramirez — a call that never came. Kolarich blames himself not only for the deaths of his wife and child, but for the informant’s murder as well. He can’t bring back his family, but he can find out who killed Ramirez and bring the killer to justice.

The 24-hour news cycle is abuzz when the police arrest homeless Iraq war veteran Mike Stoller for the murder of a young paralegal on her way home from night-school class. Stoller doesn't deny killing the woman, but his post-traumatic stress disorder is so bad that he has no real memory of that night. Jason Kolarich agrees to take the case only weeks before trial, and realizes that, unlikely as it seems, his client is probably innocent. The murdered paralegal had been tracing a money trail leading to terrorists.

James Drinker is a bit of an oddball. A funny-looking, geeky loner, he walks into Jason Kolarich’s office one day with a preemptive concern: two women have recently been murdered, seemingly by the same killer, and Drinker thinks he will be the police’s main suspect. One woman was his ex-girlfriend, he says, and the other was a friend. He’s the only link between the victims and he has no alibi for the night of either murder - surely the police will realize it soon. Believing he’s the target of a frame-up, Drinker hires Kolarich for his defense. Something about James Drinker seems off from the start, but Kolarich doesn’t give it too much thought. Until another murder occurs....