Patricia Ann Browning didn't see the deer standing in the middle of the road until it was too late, not that it would have mattered. For retired NYPD Detective, James Maguire, the pieces of his life were finally starting to fall into place. He was running his own lucrative private security firm catering to Fortune 500 companies and had just met Melody Anderson, a highly successful business woman from Long Island's posh enclave of Southampton. Everything, it seemed, was looking up. That was until the morning newscast reported that his former high school flame was missing from a one car accident on a rural country road in upstate New York. Arriving back in his old hometown Maguire must come to terms, not only with his past, but the fact that no one seems interested in pursuing the investigation into Patricia Browning's disappearance, including the missing woman's husband, the local sheriff. As Maguire struggles to put the clues together in time, he is drawn deeper into a game where people are as expendable as pieces in a chess game and the only goal is to take down the king. A crown Maguire unwittingly wears.