Jake Adler grudgingly arrives in the Twin Cities to land a job and hopefully reunite with his estranged wife and kids. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension jumps at the chance to have a Texas Ranger in its ranks, but Jake soon realizes the Bureau has fallen on hard times and is staffed solely with undesirables dumped from other state and local agencies. He needs the job, though, and accepts a probationary assignment chasing down leads on a petty fraud investigation.
An investigation that turns up a freshly murdered corpse.
Partnering out of necessity with one of the BCA's odd ducks, Jake doggedly pursues answers in the stabbing murder of a local fraudster. His search for truth takes him into rural Minnesota where nothing he encounters is as it first seems. After getting tangled up with newly released convicts, a puzzling affair and a secretive family pretending to be Native Americans, Jake gets closer to the murderer than he even realizes.
By infiltrating a heist teeming with potential suspects, Jake fits the pieces of the puzzle together. But just as he identifies the killer, one last under cover role has his mental state unraveling before his eyes.
Cold Land is a slow-burning mystery with a thrilling conclusion, a tale of loss, identity and the will to survive. Its gripping turns and vivid characters will leave you thinking long after the tale is told.