From Book 1: Officer Ben Tilden of the Dallas Police Department has had some uncanny bad luck recently. Having had his partner of many years die in a gangland shootout, Tilden took to the streets alone to see if just being a beat cop might turn things around for him.

Officer Tilden found a boy who had supposedly drowned six weeks earlier. The boy was lying out on the shore of the lake where he’d gone down with his sailboat, and yet, he was still alive. Strange as that may be, the boy regurgitated an ungodly amount of lake water, which was way too much for any human being to hold.