Former star athlete and current ghost writer Rick Devlin left Charleston in the rearview mirror just days after his father was sentenced to life in prison for killing his mother. Now--thirty years later--he is compelled to return home to the Carolina Lowcountry to care for the reviled murderer in his final days. Just minutes after reluctantly arriving at the hospice center, however, his father reveals a closely held secret about the night of the murder that causes Devlin to question whether the "trial of the century" was a total sham. "Think about all that blood they showed on that screen in the courtroom," the old man tells him. "The blood on the knife, and on your mother's clothes, and the floor. There has to be some of the killer's DNA in all of that. And I swear on your mother's grave, not one fucking speck of it is mine."

The trial testimony was clear-cut, the evidence was slam-dunk, and the jury returned its "guilty" verdict in just over two hours. But now, as Devlin begins to poke around the edges of his mother's death, the duplicitous truths of the past become increasingly exposed--and treacherous. It seems everyone has something to hide, from the father-son team of lawyers looking out for the senior Devlin's dying interests, to a vicious bagman who leaves a trail of mayhem wherever he goes. Also caught up in the secret: a corrupt state cop, a sanctimonious Bible-thumping televangelist, the leader of a white supremacist hate group, an elderly black Korean War sniper, the ghosts of several redneck murderers, and the specter of a young black boy who died a most horrific death. As Devlin scrapes at the facts behind his mother's death--and deals with the painful facets of his family's dysfunction--he learns not just the truth about his mother's violent death, but also comes to grips with the difficult lessons of his own past.