Proxate Corporation recruits a boozy former ship captain and offers him a new identity: Sean Murdoch. His job: to take charge of large ship on one voyage. Once aboard, Murdoch realizes that the ship is a prison ship, and the cargo are criminally insane inmates. Murdoch's other problem: someone has planted bombs aboard the vessel. Murdoch's acrimonious relationship with the prison warden lends extra drama to the story.

Tom and Hannah have been platonic friends for 10 years. He's a serial dater, while she wants marriage but hasn't found Mr. Right. Just as Tom is starting to think that he is relationship material after all, Hannah gets engaged. When she asks Tom to be her 'maid' of honor, he reluctantly agrees just so he can attempt to stop the wedding and woo her.

Noah Melville, a popular college professor and confirmed sensualist, provides scholarships for gorgeous college girls through an escort service, whose satisfied clients include the chairman of the school board, the chief of police, and even the mayor of their idyllic college town. When a young woman's dead body is found near the campus, the moralistic new detective in town, Patrick Kelly, investigates, leading him to the professor. Exposed, Noah must leave his devoted wife and daughter and flee the law. Kelly, for his own reasons, takes the law into his own hands to bring Noah to justice. Their deadly showdown has a surprising result.

Years after his squad was ambushed during the Gulf War, Major Ben Marco finds himself having terrible nightmares. He begins to doubt that his fellow squad-mate Sergeant Raymond Shaw, now a vice-presidential candidate, is the hero he remembers him being. As Marco's doubts deepen, Shaw's political power grows, and, when Marco finds a mysterious implant embedded in his back, the memory of what really happened begins to return.