Twenty-four years ago, Louis Kincaid was born to a black mother and a white father. And for most of those twenty-four years, he's stayed as far away as he could from Block Pool, Mississippi, where racist attitudes have evolved little. But now Louis has come home to be with his dying mother. On leave from his job in Michigan, he has just started a temporary position with the Block Pool sheriff's deportment when a human skeleton is discovered -- the victim of a lynching. And as Louis sets out to discover the victim's identity and the circumstances of his brutal death, he quickly rediscovers what it means to be a black man in a white man's town, and what it means to be a half-white cop when he seeks help from Black Pool's African-American community. Most of all, he finds that he's stumbled onto a case that will tear Black Pool apart and spill secrets too ugly to bear. For there are those who have been waiting for years to tell the story of a long-ago night of terror -- and others who will do anything to silence them.