Emma Sterling is a model FBI agent, except for one secret she can never reveal: that she’s actually Zoya Rozin, the daughter of Russian mafia kingpin Viktor Rozin, and that she has a significant criminal history herself.

When Viktor shot her mother in a drunken rage, Zoya dedicated her life to taking him down—and eventually to taking down the whole Russian mafia.  After testifying against him in court, she went into the witness protection program and eventually—leaning on her new identity with a little falsified paperwork to drive it home—was accepted as a special agent for the FBI.

After she finally transfers back to her hometown of San Francisco and is assigned to work on the Russian organized crime task force, she discovers the field office has been infiltrated by members of her father’s crime family.

Knowing Emma’s true identity as Zoya Rozin, they blackmail her into cooperating with them, threatening to destroy the career she worked so hard to create if she doesn’t help them get away with major crimes right under the FBI’s nose.

Racked with guilt over what she’s doing, Emma/Zoya finally snaps, abandoning any hope of keeping up the illusion and going all-out to destroy her father’s criminal organization, no matter the cost to herself.

(Red Shadows originally started as a novel series, but after reworking the concept over the years I determined it was a better fit for a feature film with potential sequels. I’ve already done a lot of research for this project, including interviews with FBI representatives to determine whether it was actually possible to infiltrate the Bureau using a witness protection program identity, and they were surprised to realize that it was actually plausible!)