"The KKK weren't never about race. It were always about power and greed."

So begins 86-year-old Hadley Thompson, who insists a rural historian research why two people were murdered. At first, Hubbell has little interest in the matter. Not only did the murders take place in 1924, there never was a question of who committed them. What difference could a motive make now? It is Thompson's insistence that an active Ku Klux Klan chapter fueled the feud between two blue-eyed, Baptist families that helps change Hubbell's mind.

Soon Thompson and Hubbell are an unlikely duo, tramping...