When a white baseball player with a taste for hot women and shady deals is found murdered in Tin Hollow, the black side of town in segregated Jefferson, Arkansas, racial tensions rise to the boiling point. With no clues and no one talking, the authorities turn to an outsider to solve the crime--a young, Howard-educated black attorney named Carl Tatum.

At first, the task seems small, the stakes benign. The more Carl discovers, though, the deeper he sinks into a morass of hatred and suspicion the likes of which he never imagined. He finds himself in a hometown he no longer...