Tennessee Assistant Attorney General, Casey Cooper, a top graduate of Harvard Law School, passed on a promising legal career in New York or Washington D.C. and elected instead to stay in Nashville to care for his grandmother who suffered a heart attack. Following the overdose death of a young woman connected to his family, Casey investigates and is shocked by what he learns about the opioid epidemic that is devastating the country. He learns that for decades pharmaceutical manufacturers falsely marketed their drugs and operated in ways that gave the concepts of drug cartel, drug kingpin, and drug-pusher a whole new yet equally criminal face.

Casey convinces his boss, the Tennessee Attorney General, to allow him, together with his Special Litigation team, to pursue lawsuits against opioid manufacturers. As litigation against the manufacturers builds momentum, eventually involving every state and territory, and a whistleblower appears leaking incriminating documents, the wealthy and powerful Waxler family who control the largest manufacturer, a company based in Nashville, hires a secret and highly trained assassin, the Mole, to find and plug the leak and eliminate the liability exposure. From the beginning of the story to the climatic ending, Casey builds friendships and falls in love, all while fighting legal battles and confronting dangers he had never imagined.