Two Milligrams

Baltimore is dying nine minutes at a time. Counterfeit OxyContin - pressed from fentanyl and veterinary sedative, engineered to hook and to kill - is flooding the streets, and the overdose count has stopped making the news.

FBI Special Agent Jackson Stone has spent six years running from the one case he couldn't close: his sister Maggie, dead at twenty-three from a pill that looked exactly like her medicine. When he's promoted to a joint FBI-DEA task force built to stop the flood, the job hands him the one thing he never wanted - a reason to look back. His new partner, DEA veteran Elena Ortiz, has spent twelve years reading the people behind the poison. She knows the corner isn't the product of chaos. It's a business. And businesses have families.

The Kanes have run Baltimore's port for three generations. The father is dying. The younger son is escalating. The elder son is auditing his way out. And the mother - the brilliant, grieving founder of the city's most beloved recovery foundation - has turned grief into a fortress no warrant has ever cracked. She doesn't think she sells drugs. She thinks she arbitrated quality.

As Stone and Ortiz pull one thread after another - a flipped corner boy, a dead detective's notebook,a leak inside their own house - the case becomes something neither of them was trained for: a psychological siege against a family that has made legitimacy its armor, and against the parts of themselves the job keeps asking for.

Two milligrams is the difference between a high and a homicide. It's also the weight of the choice every character in this book finally has to make.