Movie studio mogul Edgar Trenton's wife, Emma, is awoken one night to a living nightmare: a violent invasion of her beautiful home in Calabasas, California, by four masked men. Emma is beaten up and terrified, but when they leave, she realises her nightmare is only beginning. The men have kidnapped her teenage daughter, Olivia. When Emma finds a ransom note forbidding police involvement, Emma's husband Edgar can think of only one person he trusts to ensure a smooth ransom exchange: former U.S. Marshal Simon Fisk.
Still haunted by his own daughter's unsolved kidnapping many years ago, Simon now takes on child-abduction cases as a private contractor in order to bring other parents the peace of mind he's never received. Once it's clear the kidnappers never intend to return Olivia to her parents, Simon throws himself into the search for Olivia with reckless abandon, following a lethal trail that will take him from the powdery white-sand beaches of the Cayman Islands through the wild jungles of Costa Rica and into some of the darkest and deadliest cities of South America.
From the author of Good as Gone, this is another riveting thrill ride that will hook readers from the opening page and not let go until the very last.

Douglas Corleone is a former New York City defence attorney and winner of the MB/MWA First Crime Novel Competition. He now lives in Kapolei, Hawaii with his family. Payoff is the second novel in his Simon Fisk series, a follow-up to the highly acclaimed international thriller Good as Gone.