Decades after writing those words, Lulu Jefferson's letter launches Joshua Thornton and his children into an investigation of an unreported death. Joshua soon learns that the small town pastor Lulu implicates in her letter moonlights as the valley's drug lord.

Just as the reverend's granddaughter is on the verge of revealing his secret enterprise, she is brutally killed along with Joshua's high school sweetheart, Beth Davis, in a double homicide.

Appointed special prosecutor to solve the murders, Joshua Thornton uncovers a web of deception spun on the other side of the globe a half a century ago.