When someone close to him is shot dead in a roadside motel in a small town in Wyoming, DeMarco shirks his responsibilities as the Speaker of the House’s fixer to make sure the authorities are doing everything that can be done to catch the killer. He soon realizes that the rural area is dominated by Hiram Bunt, a wealthy rancher with an obstructionist streak who is willing to take on the federal government at gunpoint and seems to have a number of politicians under his thumb.
But Bunt is not the only one in the way. DeMarco also learns that his friend—a woman he was once in love with—had unearthed a number of explosive secrets during her time in the backwoods and that the deputy in charge of the investigation may be ignoring several leads to preserve a secret of his own.
Surrounded by people willing to kill to maintain the status quo, DeMarco launches his own investigation into a growing list of intertwining suspects. And being DeMarco, he concludes that breaking the law to uncover the truth is the best way to ensure that justice is done.
This thriller is gripping and genuinely unpredictable to the very end.
Mike Lawson, a former senior civilian executive for the US Navy, is the author of numerous novels starring Joe DeMarco. His first book, The Inside Ring, was rated by the Seattle Times as one of the top ten thrillers of 2005 and was a finalist for the Barry Award for Best Thriller. House Secrets was selected as one of the best thrillers of 2009 by Library Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto... with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.