Sean O'Conner returns home as a decorated hero after being wounded and surviving intense action as a commando behind German lines on D-Day, 1944. He suffers the heartbreaking loss of his parents while in a British hospital and decides to follow in his father's footsteps by joining the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department in Arizona. His first case is to investigate a girl gone missing from a transients' cotton picker camp west of Phoenix. The seemingly routine disappearance leads Sean down a twisting and dangerous path to a man known as the Weighmaster and a mysterious place called the Orange Palace. His efforts reveal the Weighmaster's vicious kidnapping of missing teenage girls from the cotton fields to sell them into prostitution in a human trafficking operation that leads through the Orange Palace to organized crime in Detroit.

Sean's relentless efforts to find the missing girls lead to attempts on his life and more tragic personal loss as he pursues the Weighmaster. The two men become locked in a revenge-fueled struggle that only one will survive.