Haunted by memories of his career as a police officer, Max Freeman isolates himself in the Everglades before learning about a series of murders involving low-income elderly women with sizable insurance policies.

When a pregnant federal judge is abducted, Max Freeman pursues an eccentric gang deep into a hidden world he knows better than most: the shadowy waterways of the Florida Everglades US district judge Diane Manchester has looked across the courtroom into the eyes of evil before. But today, as she presides over the extradition hearing of a notorious Colombian drug lord, she is also eight months pregnant. Her chair is uncomfortable, her robe is constrictive,...

Book three of the bestselling Max Freeman mystery series: Max seeks to uncover the twisted truth behind an eighty-year-old triple homicide. In the 1920s, three of Mark Mayes's ancestors left to help build the first road through the Everglades - backbreaking labor from which they never returned. Now, decades later, Mayes has discovered letters that point to murder as the cause of their disappearance, and he hires Max Freeman to get to the bottom of...