Thomas McCobb Sr. was an unknown ambulance chasing lawyer in the Miami suburbs until a high profile defendant catapulted him into a household name. Now, his face is on nearly every bus stop and billboard from Key West to Pensacola. His adopted son, Thomas Jr., a gargoyle like Grottweiler, was eager to join the family business just as soon as he could pay someone to pass the bar exam for him.

Thomas the Elder spends most of his time commuting back and forth between client offices in Tallahassee and Palm Beach, but Thomas the Younger has set up shop in Flagler, a small city about an hour south of Miami proper between the turnpike and US-1, where he represents the mayor, Frank DeMarco.

DeMarco (not seen here) is an ambitious politician with nowhere to go. Every higher office he has his eyes on is already filled by a member of his own party and he doesn’t have the muscle to challenge any of them, so he has spent the last few years amassing as much power as a municipal government will allow (and then some), ruling over his 4.65 square mile kingdom with an iron fist. He’s biding his time until an incumbent retires so he can pounce and get the hell away from “Downwind Miami.”

McCobb thinks of himself as DeMarco’s Number 2, but in actuality he’s his Number 3. His real Number 2 is his daughter, Delaney, the brains to McCobb’s brawns. The three of them have unchecked power over every facet of the city, and the biggest thorn in their collective side is Grottweiler. Grott has neither power nor ambition for it, but he’s popular with the people of Flagler because he’s always willing to lend a helping claw. He’s a community organizer, a volunteer, an activist, and that doesn’t sit well with the de facto triumvirate. Frank and Delaney see Grott as a woke radical demon, and McCobb sees him as a malformed homunculus with whom he’s ashamed to be a member of the same species; although he is a gargoyle, Thomas McCobb is his father’s son through and through, and his peers consider him “human on the inside.”

Grott is completely unaware of the political machinations behind the scenes. He doesn’t know that he’s Public Enemy No. 1, he just thinks this is what everyone has to deal with.