Picking Season

A missing girl. A hidden prison. And four days to get her out.

When sixteen-year-old Carmen Cruz disappears after her shift at a Florida packing house, the sheriff's department has a report—but no answers.

Her car is found abandoned on a rural road. The doors are unlocked. Her keys are still inside. Her phone is gone.

Her mother knows Carmen didn't simply run away.

So she goes looking for the one man people say can find things.

Mike Ramble keeps a low profile working at a small marina on Florida's Atlantic coast. He doesn't have a badge, a warrant, or an official reason to investigate a missing girl.

But Mike has experience finding things other people can't.

His investigation leads into the agricultural interior of Martin County—and toward Nichols Agricultural Labor Services, a seemingly legitimate farm-labor company operating four remote worker camps.

Behind the respectable business is something much darker.

Workers have their passports and identification confiscated. Their wages disappear into manufactured debts. Those who try to leave are brought back. And the newest camp isn't really a labor camp at all.

It's a detention facility hidden behind agricultural paperwork.

Carmen was investigating it when she disappeared.

Now she's being held inside.

With the clock running, Mike has to penetrate an operation protected by locked gates, armed enforcers, corrupt systems, and a man named Pete Greer, a former corrections officer who knows exactly how to control people.

But Greer has made one mistake.

He underestimated the man looking for Carmen.

Mike can't storm the camp. He can't simply call the police. And he can't wait for the system to move fast enough.

Instead, he has four days to gather evidence, find an ally inside the camp, understand the guards' routines, and build a way in through a drainage canal on the camp's unguarded side.

Because at 2:00 AM, Mike is going in.

And once he crosses that fence, there may be no way back.

PICKING SEASON is a gritty, cinematic action thriller featuring a determined lone investigator, a missing-person mystery, human trafficking, a corrupt labor operation, undercover investigation, rural crime, law enforcement, and a high-stakes rescue mission in the Florida agricultural heartland.

If you like fast-paced action thrillers, crime suspense, missing-person investigations, vigilante justice, former-operator heroes, human-trafficking thrillers, rural noir, and realistic tactical suspense, you'll want to start PICKING SEASON.