During the summer of 1946, a group of children play a kissing game behind a general store in rural Georgia. It's just kids having fun, until one innocent kiss leads to the brutal beating death of a ten-year-old boy. The horrific hate crime shakes an entire town. It spawns a series of murders, and a secret that is hidden for generations.

Mike Latta follows the story back into the heat and humidity of a sixty-five-year-old Georgia summer, back to dirt roads, wooden bridges, and muddy-water fishing holes, back to a single kiss that has killed, and killed again. It's a kiss that has...