Troubleshooter opens in the Pacific Northwest in the present time with Ezra Hooten, a U.S. marshal with a reputation for bringing 'em back dead about as often as alive, following a hot tip about his boyhood best friend, Norman Carpenter, a scalp-collecting psychopath Hoot has spent the bulk of his career pursuing. Connected by a shaman's blood-brother ritual since adolescence, Hoot can sometimes sense Norman - especially if he's close - and Norman can almost always sense Hoot. As young men Hoot and Norman served together in the Vietnam War, where Hoot was awarded the Bronze Star with Valor...

Troubleshooter ended with Deputy US Marshal Ezra Hooten seriously wounded, but relieved that his lifelong nemesis was dead at last. In Skyshooter: Not one to take forced early retirement too seriously, Hoot has taken a job with the TSA as an undercover air marshal... Just his bad luck that he'd become the first air marshal ever to shoot an assassin on a commercial airliner in flight. Skyshooter finds Hoot in the arms of a cold-blooded killer while simultaneously in the middle of a high-stakes smuggling game with some very nasty al-Qaeda ex-pats intent on sneaking a dirty bomb onto American...