Jeff Talley was a good husband, a fine father, and a frontline negotiator with LAPD''s SWAT unit. But the high stress, unforgiving job took an irreparable toll on his psyche. After a despondent father murders his wife and son and takes his own life, Talley hits bottom. His marriage ends, he resigns from SWAT, and he struggles to escape from his former life by taking the chief-of-police job in a sleepy, affluent bedroom community far from the chaos and crime of Los Angeles.

But Talley''s pursuit of peaceful small-town life is about to change when three young men, fleeing the robbery of a mini-mart, invade a tightly secured home, and take the family hostage. Plunged back into the high-pressure world that he has desperately been trying to put behind him, Talley finds his nightmare has barely begun, because this isn''t just any house. It belongs to a brilliant white-collar criminal who launders money for L.A.''s renegade franchise of La Cosa Nostra. And the accountant''s records of the incriminating money trail that lie within will put L.A.''s most lethal and volatile crime lord, Sonny Benza, behind bars. As Talley desperately tries to save the innocents inside, the full weight of Benza''s wrath descends on him, putting Talley and his own family at risk. Soon, all involved are held hostage by the exigencies of fate and the only one capable of diffusing the crisis is the least stable of them all.

Robert Crais is the 2006 recipient of the Ross Macdonald Literary Award. He is the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers, including The Two Minute Rule, The Forgotten Man, and L.A. Requiem.