Tom Brim Junior (Brim) is an American war hero wounded in the Korean conflict. After returning to his family home in Miami, Brim joined the Miami-Dade Police Department where he led a law enforcement team that brought down two machete and sword wielding drug cartel kingpins.


Brim went to the University of Miami at night and finished his BA in Criminal Justice. He met his future wife Margaret, a professor at the U, and after graduation, they married.


He continued in the police department part-time and enrolled in the University of Miami Law School. After receiving his law degree, he passed the bar, left the police department and joined the Miami-Dade district attorney's office as assistant district attorney.


As a police detective, Brim was exposed to what he felt were corrupt defense firms in the Dade County court system that received favorable sentences for their clients from certain judges.


Brim hires Cyrus Woofie, a colorful and noted private investigator to help him with the investigations. Woofie has direct knowledge of the law firms and can begin right away.


During Brim and Woofie's intel gathering, federal judge Umberto Hernandez is brutally murdered in a Miami park. Brim is assigned to work with Miami-Dade police and the FBI in the investigation into the judge's murder. Ballistics show a strange bullet belonging to a WW II German rifle killed the federal judge, something to help Brim's investigation. Brim hesitates, but before he can say no, Sean and Sarah go to the bank.


The suspense heightens when Sean and Sarah disappear and Brim survives an attempted assassination after being tipped off by Denton Smarts, an attorney in Brighton's law firm. After the attempt, Smarts disappears and in the search for Smarts, a headless body, suspected to be Smarts, is discovered in a submerged car in the canal on Tamiami Trail.


The action escalates as Brim's wife and son are threatened through phone calls and suspicious packages mailed to the home. Special agents are placed at Brim's home and the home of his parents.


The FBI, Miami-Dade police team, D.A. Mike Harris, special agents, and state and federal law enforcement agencies form a task force to conduct a counteroffensive that eventually leads to connections between the law firm, certain judges, gang leaders in Orlando and a drug cartel in Nanca, Peru. The odds are against the task force members as they converge on a drug producing plantation in unfamiliar hills near Nanca.


The task force surrounds and attacks the plantation on three fronts culminating in a long shooting war until all of the suspected corrupt players are killed and captured. The roundup of suspects is full of surprises as they are all trucked to waiting aircraft to take them to Miami for trials and sentencing.