After a bone-weary veteran detective and an ambitious FBI profiler on her first field assignment uncover a covert government bio-weapons program, they need to stay alive to prove it when the project’s architects become desperate to avoid exposure.

SYNOPSIS:

Former homicide detective Jack Kennedy has had his ass kicked seven ways till Sunday by years of big city crime and personal tragedy. He bails and slinks into the oblivion of a small-town police chief’s job in a sleepy Florida whistle-stop. His simple plan: grind out a few more uneventful years, banish his ghosts and float off alone into retirement.

The plan works... until two desiccated corpses mysteriously surface from a swampy sawgrass marsh on his doorstep: the Everglades. As his investigation starts, Jack finds himself partnered with ambitious but inexperienced FBI profiler Kate Burke. When she's plucked from seeming obscurity to oversee the case, she eagerly seizes the opportunity to prove her potential as a field agent.

What they don’t know is that their investigation is under close observation and stealthy manipulation by two powerful, high-level government players with nefarious objectives. When Kate and Jack unexpectedly make progress, a violent deep-state team is sent to intimidate, disorient and recover evidence. But the team fumbles the task. Jack and Kate suspect larger implications and sinister, shadowy players lurking, concealed but engaged in the case.

The trail from the mummified corpses leads Jack and Kate to uncover TALONS, a CIA black-ops genetic engineering/bio-weapons program which experimented on hundreds of unsuspecting young soldiers with deadly consequences. When they track down the project’s retired virologist, he identifies its ruthless Director of Operations as a current sitting US Senator who, at the time, was a sociopathic CIA operative selling pathogens and vaccines to big pharma and foreign governments. But when the virologist identifies the Senator’s sadistic lieutenant—the man who kidnapped his son and subjected him to the horrendous experiments of the TALONS project—Kate is stunned to learn it is the FBI Deputy Director who sent her to Florida. Kate realizes she was unwittingly sent to keep her boss and the Senator—the murderous architects of TALONS—a step ahead of them at every turn… a naïve pawn expected to fail.

Kate embraces a deep inner resolve to expose the truth at all costs and bring her devious superior to justice. Jack surprises himself with a renewed sense of self-worth and duty to seek justice for the soldiers who died excruciating deaths. It spurs him to atone for past failures and seek personal redemption. They correctly conclude that the Senator and the DD are desperate to avoid exposure and will stop at nothing to eradicate the threat. Once he realizes Jack and Kate can expose the catastrophic deaths of the soldiers in the TALONS project, the Senator orders their elimination. Kate’s boss arranges a hit squad which Kate and Jack barely survive, leading to a final confrontation in Washington with the Senator, who is forced to admit to—and try to justify—the truth about TALONS.

Faced with incontestable evidence and a disgraced future, the Senator takes his own life. The Deputy Director is arrested shortly after. The case's resolution enables Kate to foresee a bright future at the FBI while Jack returns to Florida feeling he has conquered his demons, found redemption and can at last put some of his ghosts to rest.

TALONS