The lives of a female federal judge from Texas and her family are turned upside down by cryptic and terrifying letters and other messages that are sent to their home and the court house by an apparently unhappy litigant.

The communications are determined by law enforcement agencies to pose a “credible threat.” Judge Avery Lassiter and her family are required to live under 24-hour-a-day United States Marshal Service protection, for several months, while another federal agency—the FBI, whose behavioral analysis unit in Quantico, Virginia classified the communications as a “credible threat”—investigates and tries to identify the letter writer before he carries out his articulated plans to kill the judge and others.

While the story initially explores the impact of the death threat on Judge Lassiter and her family, it ultimately reveals a plot of a young man—frustrated with the American justice system—whose aim is to kill numerous judges and other actors that he believes have ruined lives with impunity.

The book both entertains and informs, as it takes the reader inside the courtroom, behind the bench, into the private world of a federal judge’s chambers, and into the mind of a troubled victim-turned-killer and his thirst for his own idea of justice. It is also a story of guardianship, duty, and attribution to the U.S. Marshals who quietly stand in the shadows protecting the courts, judges, and society generally from those who pose harm.

The book ends with an unexpected twist that sets itself up for a sequel.