Looming high above the cliffside along a remote coastline, Ondstrand House is the headquarters of the shadowy biotech firm Ondstrand Biologic. When the body of the organization’s most gifted young scientist, Allegra Stans, is discovered in a walk-in refrigerator, Agent Myles is called in to investigate. Myles works for Standard Division, the most feared element of a vast state security apparatus, and he’s been dispatched to the brooding manor. As his investigation proceeds, Myles discovers that “gifted scientist” is only one thread in the complicated fabric of Allegra’s life. There are darker strands as well, all woven into a pattern of secrets, each presenting a reasonable motive for murder.

Adam Knox runs a clinic near Los Angeles’s Skid Row, making ends meet by making house calls on those too famous or too criminal to seek other medical care. When a young boy is abandoned at his clinic, Knox is determined to find the boy’s family and save him from the not-so-tender mercies of the child welfare bureaucracy. But Knox’s search for the volatile woman who may or may not be the boy’s mother leads him and his friend, a former Special Forces operator, into a labyrinth of human traffickers, Russian mobsters and corporate security thugs; and squarely into the sights of a powerful, secretive and utterly ruthless family that threatens to destroy Dr. Knox and everything --- and everyone --- he holds dear.