"Things go as wrong as love in a rock-'n'-roll song for dangerous, young David Egan when he finds himself charged with the murder of the pampered but seriously disturbed daughter in the wealthy Griffin family of Black River Falls. They go fatally wrong the night that Egan crashes his black Mercury into a bridge at ninety miles an hour in a drag race outside of town - by no accident, it would appear, as the Merc's brake line had been cut." "Struggling lawyer and sometime private eye Sam McCain finds himself, not unusually, hauled into the investigation by the incorrigible Judge Esme Ann Whitney, who continues to make no attempt to conceal her disdain for the local police and their khaki-clad chief Cliffie Sykes, Jr. While Sam manages to establish a critical connection between the two victims easily enough, the solution to the case more than eludes him the mellow autumnal afternoon that he stumbles on a third: Brenda Carlyle, wife of a former all-American, her once robust body lying lifeless in the last suds of her bath." Jealous husbands, philandering spouses, jilted girlfriends, outraged parents, a long-suffering wife - Sam does not want for suspects. Or for clues. It's the conclusive evidence that surprises him and that frostily ends the Indian summer in Iowa 1961.