The murder of a small town's most admired businessman and philanthropist - a man without an enemy in the world - in time sets in motion events which reveal the moral decay festering beneath his family's golden surface. Following the murder of her husband, his widow has metamorphosed suspiciously from a mousy hausfrau doting on her family to a newly energized vamp hurrying to a secret rendezvous with a mysterious lover. Her 24-year old son later discovers a letter from her paramour, written shortly before his father's murder, and begins to agonize over the unthinkable. The title character, the...