It may have changed its name, but the KGB is up to its old tricks, only this time with a new puppet—the American Public! Steve Nguyen, a newly minted homicide detective with the San Francisco Police Department, is cut loose on his first solo case—the mysterious death of a young accountant with a public-interest foundation.

Everything points to natural causes, but Nguyen, to the dismay of his chief, isn’t ready to close the book. With no motive, means, or opportunity, the anxiety-racked law school drop-out starts digging anyway. Nguyen’s tortuous investigation leads through the halls of Congress, the gritty oil fields of the Siberian tundra, stately Black Sea palaces of the petro-czars, and the mean streets of San Francisco.

Aided by his misfit cousins, Tina Ngo, an attorney with a special practice in feral law, and Tommy Tran, a computer geek straddling the tightrope of legality, Nguyen unearths a malevolent alliance among a billionaire Russian oligarch, a duplicitous foundation director, and a renowned philanthropist hell-bent on tightening Russia’s monopoly on the European energy market by choking-off American exports. If it means corrupting the American electoral system through illegal campaign contributions, political blackmail, and a few dead bodies, so be it.

In this dark world of Russian deception, Nguyen unravels of a complex tangle of illegal offshore accounts, shell corporations, and front companies, all while ducking the crosshairs of the SVR’s most skilled assassins. He may solve a murder and maybe save a republic.