The Setup

John McMahon’s electrifying series continues as Gardner Camden and the PAR team investigate the suspicious death of an FBI agent.

When decorated FBI agent Kevin Winslow is found dead in a Mobile, Alabama hotel room—a needle in his lap, the deadbolt thrown from the inside—the case is closed before it opens. Another burned-out federal employee who couldn't hold it together.

But Gardner Camden and the team at PAR don’t close cases. They read them. Detail by detail. And these details don’t add up.

The pattern-obsessed leader of PAR– the FBI's elite analytical unit– notices what everyone else has already decided not to notice about the dead agent. No track marks. Eleven commendations in four years. And a wife who swears her husband couldn't take an aspirin.

On a trip to Winslow’s hometown, Gardner has his answer: the dead agent had a rare allergy to opioids. One drop would have killed him. Which means Winslow wasn’t a closet drug addict; someone murdered him.

Gardner and the PAR team is pulled from the backwater swamps of Alabama to the back corridors of Washington– where three FISA court judges have died in suspicious accidents, a Chinese intelligence operation has quietly burrowed into the architecture of American surveillance, and the truth about the FBI agent’s death reaches all the way back to the desk of FBI director Craig Poulton himself, the team’s longtime nemesis.

And nobody’s innocent.

Everyone knows Poulton will do anything to get ahead. The question is– how far back do his crimes go? And are Gardner and PAR willing to find out?