A silent father. A ticking deadline. A hunter who won't let go.

Coming home never ends well. After decades away, Mason James returns to the East Bay when his father, Max, is found half-dead in an Emeryville alley behind the Key Club. Max won't talk. The police call it a mugging. Mason knows better.

The McKnights—family by blood and bond—built an empire that went legitimate long ago. Now someone is prying it open from the inside: identity theft, hacked systems, and a pressure campaign aimed at one prize—mineral-rich farmland Melvin McKnight refuses to sell. The man making the offer is Omer Sahin, a Turkish power broker with nightclub fronts, Russian muscle, and a deadline. His enforcer network reaches into the past: Victor Novikov at the Key, and Jason Riverton, the crooked ex-cop who once made Mason's teenage life hell.

With Max's health failing and Melvin hiding an early-onset Alzheimer's diagnosis, Mason is forced back into the methods he swore off—surveillance, leverage, and violence—while fighting panic attacks, guilt, and a temper that has ruined lives before. Backed by a razor-smart tech ally and Midas McKnight, the one friend who knows his darkest history, Mason enters a cat-and-mouse war where every move is watched, every loyalty has a price, and "legit" is just another mask.

How far will you go when the past demands payment?

Like his first novel, "A Snow Leopard Named Midas," S.L. Cook's "An Athlete In Winter" is for readers who love the moral complexity of S.A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland, the hunter and hunted tension of Thomas Perry's Vanishing Act, and the psychological depth of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.