In a mesmerizing debut, cop-turned-author Donald Harstad uses real-life events to paint a jarring picture of crime in America's heartland--where two-stoplight towns no longer offer refuge from modern-day brutality.

Life in Maitland, Iowa, is usually predictable, even for a cop. But all that changes the day Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman's dispatcher receives the terrifying 911 call. The day cops find the mutilated bodies at a remote farmhouse. The first of eleven days Carl will never forget.

As hotshot investigators fly in from New York, Carl and his fellow cops use old-fashioned...

A killer is placing his cross hairs over the American heartland....

The pair of frozen corpses were found under a tarp in the machine shed of an empty farmhouse. Two males -- brothers -- both killed by bullets from a Russian automatic fired at close range. The cops have a suspect: a man Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman busted five years earlier and the county's lead suspect in a series of recent robberies.

Houseman knows they have the wrong guy. He also knows they've got something bigger than a burglary gone bad ... especially when the FBI starts showing up in Maitland. The...