Some stories you chase. Others chase you.

Brando Riley is a burned-out investigative journalist chasing one last shot at relevance. Forty-seven, divorced, estranged from the daughter he adores, and hollowed out by years of casual regrets, he’s come to Oxnard to settle his late aunt’s affairs and file a puff piece on the Starkwell Oil Company’s massive coastal spill. What he finds instead is a corporate cover-up drenched in crude, a dead girl the authorities are all too willing to write off as an accidental drowning, and the creeping certainty that Hayley Jacobsen’s fate and his own are somehow bound together.

Hayley was a champion swimmer. She didn’t just drown. And Riley, no tough guy but armed with a stubborn pen and a nose for corporate rot, can’t let it go — even as the trail leads into darker water than he ever bargained for. Between a scarred ex-Soviet neighbor with mysterious wealth, a nervous editor pulling his lifeline, and an oil company willing to bury anything that threatens its bottom line, Riley finds himself investigating not only a murder but the man he’s become.