When the police tell a wealthy industrialist that her missing son has faked his own kidnapping, she hires Elvis Cole and Joe Pike-and Cole soon determines that it was no fake. The boy and his secret girlfriend have been taken, and are now lost in the gray and changing world of the professional border kidnappers who prey not only on innocent victims but also on one another-buying, selling, and stealing victims like commodities. Fortunately, the kidnappers...

Dru Rayne and her uncle are Louisiana refugees who relocated to Los Angeles after Hurricane Katrina. Now, five years after the storm, their struggling restaurant faces a different danger. When Joe Pike witnesses Dru's uncle beaten by a neighborhood gang intent on extorting protection money, he offers his own brand of protection. But neither Dru nor her uncle want his help--and neither do the federal agents mysteriously watching their store.

Los Angeles PI Elvis Cole is hired by three children who want to make sure their father, Clark Hewitt, is still alive. Hewitt went into hiding, pursued by Russian counterfeiters on whom he squealed. The investigation takes Elvis to Hewitt's hometown, Seattle, where he runs afoul of both the newly emerging Russian Mafia and U.S. Federal Marshals.