Takedown

'I realized I didn’t want any part of believing my parents were murdered. I’d grown comfortable with the old narrative, however false and however bad. I was the illegitimate child of a junky mother, orphaned by her addiction. Maybe Pops was right to let sleeping dogs lie.'


Benjamin Joel was a fatherless eleven-year-old boy when he found his mother dead of a heroin overdose in a run-down Kansas trailer home. Doing his best to shutter away her memory and his own violent past, Ben is now an attorney trying to make a life for himself and his family. While investigating a case for a client accused of murdering an ex-cop, a strung out flesh peddler named Ricky Butler tells Ben he’s the spitting image of a guy Ben has never heard of named Paco Correa. Ben shrugs off the comment as the ramblings of a burnout until Butler references the death of Ben’s mother twenty-eight years earlier in shockingly familiar terms, claiming she and Correa were murdered by dirty cops. Ben’s search for the truth about the death of his mother and a father he never knew drags him back into the dark recesses of his past and puts him in the crosshairs of a ruthless sex trafficking ring.