Dr. Gideon Marshall is a geology prof at an obscenely wealthy liberal arts college in Iowa, and he gets called as an expert witness for trials where crime scene dirt is critical evidence. The series can be thought of as a five-book essay on scientific literacy, or maybe the lack thereof, given what some of the characters would like to do with a murder victim’s theoretical research, namely convert fracking technology into a weapon of mass destruction by making earthquakes happen on purpose at chosen locations around the world. Marshall, and his wife Mykala, are thrown into a mess involving murder of a geologist faculty member at Cavanaugh College where Marshall teaches, a multi-billionaire oil baron alum from Texas, the oil baron’s high-maintenance daughter who’s a student in Marshall’s department and carrying on an affair with a faculty member, campus security, multiple law enforcement personnel and agencies in Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, and eventually the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This whole mess is built on the oil baron’s determination to build an earthquake machine using fracking technology and the equations from that murder victim’s research. The series can be thought of as an extended examination of what can happen when powerful men believe they can achieve ultimate power by building ultimate weapons, all without necessarily understanding that what science seems to promise cannot always be delivered regardless of a person’s desire.
