The time is the present; the setting Cedar Rapids, Iowa; the hero private detective Walsh, a man weary of a past he cannot escape. Walsh has recently retired from the sheriff's office, and he is preoccupied with wrenching personal turmoil. But Walsh's past won't leave him alone; it comes to visit him one day in the person of Lisa Pennyfeather, the wife of a man Walsh sent to prison for murder twelve years before. Lisa wants Walsh to clear her husband's name.

Walsh is reluctant, but he is drawn into the case when a woman's corpse is discovered in the Pennyfeathers's backyard a week after George Pennyfeather is released from prison. Is George being framed, and if so, was he framed twelve years before?

Walsh, torn by the thought that he may have helped put an innocent man through twelve years of hell, starts looking for answers. Are George's former employers and family friends Paul and Richard Heckart as upstanding and compassionate as they appear? Was Lisa having an affair with lowlife wheeler-dealer Karl Jankov, the man George was convicted of killing? Who was the woman found murdered in the Pennyfeathers's backyard, and what was her connection to the Jankov murder?

As Walsh delves deeper into the case, he discovers that things thought to be long buried can rear up suddenly, ominously, out of the night.