"It's 1956. A plane bearing a mysterious cargo takes off from a small airport outside Los Angeles and disappears into a raging storm. Nearly 60 years later, while flying over California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, retired military assassin-turned-civilian flight instructor and would-be Buddhist Cordell Logan catches a glint of sunlight on metal and spots what appears to be aircraft wreckage. His life will never be the same. Logan and his beautiful ex-wife, Savannah, plan a reconciliation in posh Lake Tahoe. But upon landing in the Ruptured Duck, his beloved aging Cessna, Logan agrees to put those plans on hold when he's asked to help guide a search and rescue team to the remote, mountainous crash site. The team finds not only a long-missing airplane, with the mummified remains of its pilot still at the controls, but something much more recent and far more sinister: the body of a young man, shot to death only hours earlier. Someone has beaten the rescuers to the site and will clearly stop at nothing to profit from what the plane was carrying - including kidnapping and threatening to kill Savannah if Logan refuses to help them carry out their getaway plans. With the clock ticking and the love of his life in peril, Logan is drawn into a vexing vortex as personal and potentially deadly as any he's ever known"--c Provided by publisher.
Moments before he is executed, the killer of Hub Walker's daughter makes a startling allegation; the real murderer is Walker's close friend, a prominent U.S. defense contractor. Now Hub Walker, a famous Vietnam War hero, wants to hire somebody willing to spend a few days hunting up information that will refute the convicted killer's groundless but widely reported claims, and help restore his friend's good name. That somebody, as fate would have it, is sardonic civilian flight instructor, would-be Buddhist and retired military assassin Cordell Logan. Thus begins one of the year's most suspenseful mystery-thrillers.--From inside front dust cover flap.