Attractive, young Dr. Meredith Blake often feared that her happiness as the wife of Hugh Prather, mayor of the little Georgia town of River Gap, and mother of a year-old son, was too great to last--and it was. For when the young surgeon came away from an emergency operation on a back-country girl, patient of the country doctor, Dr. Merry knew that everything she loved would have to be risked to rid the county of the man responsible for the girl's death.