Investigator Wayne Weston is found dead of an apparent suicide in his home in an up-scale Cleveland suburb, and his wife and six-year-old daughter are missing. Weston's father insists that private investigators Lincoln Perry and Joe Pritchard take the case to exonerate his son and find his grand daughter and daughter-in-law. As they begin to work they discover there is much more to the situation than has been described in the prevalent media reports. There are rumours of gambling debts and extortion, and a group of Russians with ties to organised crime who don't appreciate being investigated - a point they make clear with baseball bats.
With some assistance from newspaper reporter Amy Ambrose, Perry and Pritchard believe they are making swift progress. But then they are warned off the investigation by a millionaire real estate tycoon and the FBI. Just when they feel they are closing in on a possible source of answers, another murder forces them to change direction in the case.
Perry travels to a resort town in South Carolina and there he finds more than one game being played, and all of them are deadly. The stakes quickly become very personal for Perry, and it's clear that there will be no walking away from this case.
