California Highway Patrol Lieutenant, Erin "Red" Wolff, call sign 95-L, is a street-smart, tough cop, and a great leader. She also happens to be gay. A twenty year veteran, she is assigned to command the Highway Patrol's most remote location, Crescent City. Here, nestled on the Pacific Ocean and the border with Oregon, among the magnificent Redwood forests, she finds police work, and people's attitudes towards gays in rural Northern California, is much different than in the big city. When two of her officers are brutally murdered, 95-L finds herself confronting small town politics, jurisdictional disputes, and a homophobic county sheriff with his own checkered past who is more concerned with getting reelected than solving the murders. The local authorities' investigation doesn't pass the "smell" test. Someone has been planting evidence, trying to steer the investigation in a different direction, and everyone is only too anxious to pin the murders on an ex-con. Everyone except 95-L. Driven to find the real killer of her officers, 95-L launches her own investigation that leads from Malibu, to a clandestine "meth" lab in the remote mountains of a National Forest, and to a twenty-five year old unsolved murder in Virginia. It also leads to the realization that somewhere on the North Coast there's a serial killer preying on rich women.