Randall Wilkes, his high-profile career as a Chicago newspaper columnist now in ruins, has agreed to take on a lucrative writing assignment from his boyhood friend, ex-Governor Sonny McMahan. Sonny, whose own career is also under a cloud, needs a ghost-written autobiography to burnish his image and possibly prepare him for a return to politics. And so Randall finds himself, after twenty years, back in Pilgrim's Rest, the Tennessee hill town where he and Sonny grew up. Randall visits Faye McMahan, Sonny's mother. But the old woman has become addled with age - speaking of her dead husband as though he were still alive and worrying that her son might be in danger. Randall leaves feeling agitated. Hours later, when a terrible storm descends, he makes the short journey back across the fields to Faye's house. There, he discovers Faye hideously murdered, her body swinging from the rafters. And it isn't long before another member of the McMahan clan is found dead. Drawing on his skills as an investigative reporter, Randall sets out to discover who is behind the killings. His search takes him the length of the state through the colours of gathering autumn, from the flatlands of the Mississippi delta to the Great Smoky Mountains in the east. It's a state that was split by the Civil War, where history still lies close to the surface, and tales of murder and betrayal have weighed heavily on the town of Pilgrim's Rest. Before all the answers are in, more people will die, an old score will be settled, and the dead will finally tell their stories.