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At 4:40 a.m., a seventy-foot yacht lies aground on a Florida flat with every light still burning, and a dead man in her engine room.

The dental records say he's Hollis Pike, a lonely charter captain who went missing in June. The yacht's papers say she belongs to Calder Vance, a Tampa billionaire who is very much alive, and whose own Meridian is sitting in a Fort Lauderdale boatyard.

Every page about this boat is perfect.

To FBI agent Tess Prescott, that's the problem.

Three weeks into a new command, with an internal-affairs file still open from the Fourth of July, Tess follows the paper into Heron Pass, a fishing town on Florida's Gulf Coast that has kept its mouth shut since the smuggling days. There she finds:

• clone yachts wearing the names of real American boats;
• a data system built to keep her blind;
• a town that knows more than it says;
• an old enemy who was supposed to be dead.

The men who copied the boat have copied something else. Hurricane Delphine is coming to wash it all away, and the people who own the truth have a midnight deadline.

When the eye passes over Heron Pass, Tess will have forty minutes.

A relentless, twist-driven thriller of stolen identities, dirty money and a storm that erases everything, from the world of The Transparent Guard.

Perfect for fans of Michael Connelly, C.J. Box, Randy Wayne White and Daniel Silva. Can be read as a standalone; continues the story begun in 2:17.