Highest Law — R.J. Pineiro

It is said that the hardest battles for our veterans are fought within, but what would you do if you discovered that a widely-available PTSD medication designed to help our military heroes cope with the horrors of war had a very uncommon but quite violent side effect? Just how far would you go to expose the truth?While on a routine mission in Kandahar Province, Southern Afghanistan, U.S. Navy SEAL Commander Law Pacheco witnessed what he thought was the use of biological weapons by American civilian contractors on Afghan noncombatants. The very next day, he and his team fell victim to the violence of a U.S. gunship unleashed accidentally on a mountainside where he was operating, shredding his back and tearing off his left leg.Although it takes him six months to learn to walk again, Law's worst wounds are not visible. Suffering from PTSD and survivor's guilt, but determined not become a veteran-suicide statistic, he tries to put the past behind him and move on with his life by joining the ranks of the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service. There, along with feisty special agents Mia Patel and Beatriz Howard, Law investigates a mysterious mass shooting at a VA hospital by a decorated Navy veteran with no priors.But the investigation unknowingly takes him down a twisting path into his former life that challenges the official reports of what happened on that mountain while also threatening to expose a pharmaceutical conspiracy reaching the highest law of the land.