It begins in 1967, in a small Midwestern town scarcely touched by the tumults of the decade. Seventeen-year-old Tony Lord, Lake City's star athlete, seems destined for great things. His driving ambition to move far beyond the narrow world of his parents and his hometown is precisly what attracts Alison Taylor, the beautiful and enigmatic daughter of the town's leading family, and it is what sets Tony apart from his two closest friends: Sam Robb--mercurical and charismatic, his only rival for athletic honors--and Sam's girl Sue Cash, whose affection for Tony may mask something more.

But suddenly everything changes. Alison Taylor is brutally murdered. Tony is the number one suspect. The town turns against him. His friendship with Sam is destoryed. When Tony leaves Lake City, vowing never to return, the loss of Sue is his sole regret.

And it is Sue's urgent phone call, twenty-seven years later, that changes Tony's life once more.

For Tony Lord is now a San Francisco lawyer seemingly divorced from his youth. But the bitter lessons of Alison's murder have made him what he is--a relentless advocate dedicated to the defense of his clients. Sue's plea for help is one he cannot ignore: her husband, Sam Robb, now the vice principal of Lake City High School, is suspected of the hideous murder of a female student.

Tony's return to Lake City plunges him into the most deeply rooted conflicts of his own past: the revulsion he feels for the crime for which Sam may be charged; the revival of his feelings for Sue, the town's lingering suspicion that Tony is hinself a murderer. And Tony finds that he is reliving his most complex relationship of all: his friendship with Sam Robb. In the merciless crucible of a murder trial, Tony must confront not only the fear that Sam is a murderer, but the concealed passions and buried truths that underlie Alison death.