On his first day in Greenhill, South Dakota, Carl Wilcox painted some signs, met the Coverly sisters - fourteen-year-old Steffi and twenty-one-year-old Holly - and learned about the death four years earlier of a girl named Genevieve. On his first evening in town, Wilcox got his ear split in a fight at the dance hall, met Officer Schoop, and began looking into the matter of how a teenage girl everyone loved could be run over twice out by a lonely cemetery in the middle of the night "just by accident." All in all, a normal day for Carl Wilcox, a man who doesn't go looking for trouble but never fails to find it, who never fails to spy a well-turned ankle or the sparkle in a young woman's eye (or put one there), and who never fails to uncover the liars, cheats, and murderers hiding behind the facades of the quiet homes in the small, quiet towns he passes through.