Former homicide detective and star of Investigation Discovery, Joe Kenda follows his authentic and fascinating debut novel with First Do No Harm, another addictive tale of crime and punishment as only he can tell it.

A string of overdoses in Colorado Springs has Detectives Joe Kenda and Lee Wilson on the lookout for a bad batch of heroin that has been cut with a drug they’ve never seen before.

Meanwhile, at Springs General Hospital, Dr. Blair Moreland—the notoriously unpleasant head anesthesiologist—has found a way to feed his deepening addiction to the very same powerful new drug: Fentanyl.

But when Dr. Moreland starts supplying the dangerous painkiller to dealer Lula Lopez—planning to manufacture the drug himself—he angers a Mexican crime syndicate and sets into motion a cycle of death and violence that threatens to engulf the entire city.

Detectives Kenda and Wilson must track down the source of this killer heroin before anyone else can overdose—and stop Moreland before he can escape the long arm of the law.

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Halloween was less than a week away, and the decorative ghouls and witches, grinning pumpkins and scythe-wielding zombies that stalked the shadows of Lewiston’s imagination wilted as the sun rose higher behind the eight majestic spires of the iconic Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church on Bartlett Street. If those 170-foot-high spires were to ever disappear, Lewiston would be as unrecognizable as Paris without the Eiffel Tower.

Two miles north at Just-In-Time Recreation Center on Mollison Way, the close-knit staff would be making sure the pinsetter machines on each of its 34 bowling lanes were working properly, food was prepped and beer kegs primed for the influx of league participants later in the day, and rental shoes and bowling balls were cleaned and ready to go.

Four miles south of them, the equally tight-knit staff at Schemengees Bar & Grille on Lincoln St. would be setting up for the lunchtime crowd, and readying the pool tables and cornhole lanes for a busy night of league play. It’s not an easy name to pronounce, but that didn’t matter to its many dedicated regulars who gathered there after work for a fun time out with friends.

No one could know during that ordinary October day that the pulse of daily life in Lewiston and the area would be on life support just an hour after sunset that very evening. No one, that is, except the man who would be responsible for making sure of that.

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On the morning of May 16, 1922, a young man's body was found on a desolate road in Westchester County. The victim was penniless ex-sailor Clarence Peters. Walter Ward, the handsome scion of the family that owned the largest chain of bread factories in the country, confessed to the crime as an act of self-defense against a violent gang of "shadow men," blackmailers who extorted their victims' moral weaknesses. From the start, one question defined the investigation: What scandalous secret could lead Ward to murder?

For sixteen months, the media fueled a firestorm of speculation. Unscrupulous criminal attorneys, fame-seeking chorus girls, con artists, and misogynistic millionaires harnessed the power of the press to shape public perception. New York governor and future presidential candidate Al Smith and editor of the Daily News Joseph Medill Patterson leveraged the investigation to further professional ambitions. Famous figures like Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and F. Scott Fitzgerald weighed in. As the bereaved working-class Peters family sought to bring the callous Ward to justice, America watched enraptured.

Capturing the extraordinary twists and turns of the case, Shadow Men conjures the excess and contradictions of the Jazz Age and reveals the true-crime origins of the media-led voyeurism that reverberates through contemporary life. It's a story of privilege and power that lays bare the social inequity that continues to influence our system of justice.

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