LETHAL

An FBI agent, deep undercover, is the prime suspect in a mass murder and must uncover the corrupt forces behind the killings to clear his name.

When 4-year-old Emily tells her mother, Honor, that there’s a strange man in their backyard in Tambour, a small Louisiana bayou town, Honor is skeptical. But when she goes to check, the man, Coburn, accosts her. Holding her at gunpoint, Coburn ransacks her home, looking for something he won’t divulge—but it involves her late husband Eddie, a Tambour police officer killed in a suspicious car accident. Meanwhile, Tambour police, deputy sheriffs and twin brothers Doral and Fred, who were Eddie’s best friends, are searching for Coburn, a warehouse employee who allegedly shot his employer and six others and is now on the run. When Stan, Eddie’s father, grows suspicious, he directs the posse to Honor’s remote house. Finding nothing on Eddie, Coburn finally leaves, only to double back in time to shoot Fred, who has just arrived to check on Honor. Fred was ordered to kill Honor, Coburn claims, because the twins (and possibly Eddie before them) are in the employ of a sinister figure known only as the Bookkeeper who “facilitates” trans-border trafficking in humans, drugs and weapons. Now it’s unsafe for Honor and Emily to stay put—Doral will hunt her down. Still unwilling to believe that her husband, a decorated cop, was implicated in such depravity, Honor nevertheless flees with Coburn, Emily in tow. As they hide out on a deserted shrimp boat, Coburn bucks his Washington boss’s directive that he come in from the cold, and Honor fights her attraction to him (without success, naturally). Subplots involving a street thug who is the Bookkeeper’s chief enforcer, Honor’s brassy girlfriend Tori and her serial marriages, and an honest but ineffectual FBI officer and his wife, whose lives revolve around their severely disabled son, add some interest to a story line which is otherwise pat and predictable.

Standard Brown fare.