After twenty years of military service, Sergeant Major Zinny Zubell is released from the army as a reduction in force. He travels to North Carolina to discharge his best friend, Major Jack Klinkscales, from a suicide watch at a nearby VA hospital. Zubell wants to help his lifelong friend, who has been severely crippled in combat, adjust to civilian life.

Zubell settles in the up-and-coming city of Charlotte and finds out he doesn't fit in with the genteel southern culture. A hardheaded man bound by duty, Zubell accepts a temporary assignment working as an investigator for Claude Sedley, the senior partner at a well-established Charlotte law firm. The excitement of a new career is short-lived when it turns out things aren't what they seem. Zubell becomes suspicious about Sedley's assignment to trail a local entrepreneur, Damon Slade, without any need-to-know information. His gut tells him both men are masking the truth about a woman's body that was found in her car at the bottom of a lake.

Zubell persists without pay to investigate a connection that pulls everyone involved into a puzzling conflict. How can he get the attention of the authorities when no one is investigating the deadly accident? Digging for the truth reveals a tangled web of cover-ups that leaves Zubell and Klinkscales right where they don't want to be--in the middle of the action. Their investigation leads them to a young woman named Silver Kelter, whose shocking revelation about Slade's violent ways makes Zubell believe his instincts are on target.