In a lush, sun-drenched state preserve in Palm Glade, Florida, a young couple in a parked car wakes from a night of drunken carousing to find the body of a headless woman submerged in the area known as Fisheating Creek.

Jim Longworth takes Callie's son Jeff to a heavily-wooded area to collect bugs for a school science project. In the effort, they stumble upon an abandoned airplane with a dead body inside. The victim turns out to be a retired Special Ops guy who taught flight school lessons on the side to make extra money.

Longworth gets his first taste of a Florida hurricane, but instead of waiting out the storm, he gets swept up in a murder investigation that appears to be a spree killing and he must find the killer before there is another victim. Meanwhile, due to the storm, Callie and Carlos deal with a massive influx of patients at the hospital and a power outage leads Carlos and Daniel to take extreme measures in order to save lives.

Jim is introduced to the intensely competitive world of Florida high school football as the small town of Pahokee prepares for the annual "Muck Bowl," an event that draws national attention because of the many NFL players who came from that area and who have played in that game. When the dead body of a businessman emerges from the muck in a sugar cane field days before the big game, Longworth must figure out who would want the man dead.

Longworth gets a nightmarish call from Daniel that Carlos has been found dead. Longworth is speechless and horrified at the site of his face-down dead body, but not as horrified as the real Carlos who is alive and p* off. Thanks to his daughter's internet shopping addiction, he was the victim of identity fraud by the murder victim. Longworth tracks the victim to the fake-Carlos' girlfriend who is a social anthropology doctoral student who has many research subjects who are emotionally attached to her. Longworth tracks down each of her subjects in his quest to find the real killer.