When a DEA raids Jake Grummond's dairy in early hours of an August morning, they find no drugs, but they destroy the dairy. In the process the government agents turn Jake's wife Mary Margaret into a basket case. With little help from the government and less from the legal system, Jake takes on the hunt for justice and tries to unravel the reason for the raid.

Bank rob bers run a roadblock, killing the sheriff of a high country county and severely wounding a deputy, the disappear into the mountain snow. What begins in mid-January as a straightforward search for two crooks by lat May becomes a tangle of people and motives as former sheriff turned ocnsultant to the staste Bureau of Investigation C. W. Blakenship unrevels a snarl of embezzlement, drugs and murder that climaxes with a forest fire and a dynamite-laden confrontation.