Crete Sloan, a rambunctious, hard-nosed tough guy, banged around life's experiences before absconding to a remote island in the Bahamian Atlantic. First, as an enforcer for the Pittsburgh mob through high school and into his early twenties, then shot and left for dead by a close friend, a career change to the Pittsburgh cops, where he couldn't do the discipline, then a private eye, and now a mercenary for the good guys. Arlo Taylor is a British billionaire working out of London whose wife and two grown daughters are slaughtered aboard his yacht, the Skyliner, by Somali Pirates. He hires Sloan...

Crete Sloan, a mercenary with a passion for justice, living on an island in the Atlantic plunges into a hunt-and-be-hunted game with a professional contract killer. One of Sloan's few friends, Ben Tolberg, is murdered at the Hotel del Coronado across the bay from San Diego. Complicating the case is the crime scene in which Tolberg, intense, driven and morally straight, is found on a bed with a known high-class call girl, both of them naked, both of them dead. It is into this episode of senseless murder that Sloan is pulled from his placid island to a tangle of trouble a continent away....

"Al-Qaida," he said. "Is good for you to know who killed you." "American," I said. "Good for you to know who's going to take your head off." "Tuco," I whispered into the headset, and in that moment, the man's head came apart in a mist of blood, bone, and brain matter, as a watermelon smashed to the ground. Crete Sloan lives alone on an island in the Bahamian Atlantic. Bimini is to the west, the Berry Islands to the east. He is a mercenary who fights wars for the good guys. Private wars, not government wars. Someone steals your million-dollar Ferrari LaFerrari. The local cops can't locate it....