Joe Gunther, a policeman for most of his adult life, gets the call that every cop hates: A fellow officer has been killed in the line of duty. During what appears to have been a routine traffic stop on a dark country Vermont road, a deputy sheriff was shot to death. From what can be seen on the cruiser's video recorder, the killers appear to be a couple of Boston-based drug runners.Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation are brought in to identify the killers--and track them down up and down the northeast shoreline. Meanwhile, Alan Budney, the disaffected son of a Maine lobsterman, is a man with big ambitions--to usurp and replace the state's primary drug kingpin, a plan that will inevitably place him on a dangerous collision course with Gunther's investigation… .
