Grave danger

Defense attorney Jack Swyteck returns in a case that mixes politics, international diplomacy and personal risk. His new client is a single mother who fled Iran for Miami with her daughter. Her husband has accused her of kidnapping the child, and Jack has to do more than mount a strong defense. To keep the father from taking the girl back to Tehran, he must build a case under international law and show that sending her back would put her in danger.

Nothing about the case is quite what it seems. Jack soon learns that his client is actually the child's aunt, and that the girl's biological mother may have been killed by Iran's morality police. That raises questions about what part the father played in his wife's death. It also raises another: why are Jack's own wife, FBI agent Andie Henning, and her superiors pressing her to talk Jack into dropping the case?

As Jack looks into who is manipulating the legal proceedings and what they stand to gain, politics threatens to derail the case and override the child's best interests. Jack and Andie end up on opposite sides, and their marriage is at stake. To hold it together they have to work through a web of deceit that runs from a Miami courthouse to the highest levels of Washington, DC.