The year is 1932. The place is North Carolina, the domain of the all-powerful Castleton dynasty, rulers of a vast tobacco empire. Beneath their genteel facade, the family wields an iron hand of control to enforce its own law across the back roads of the countryside. When twenty-two-year-old Kyle Castleton, heir to the family fortune, is found shot to death in his bedroom, the Castletons swiftly change the official cause of death from suicide to murder. Two suspects are fingered: Faith Castleton, Kyle's stunning young wife and a star of the Broadway stage, and Boyd Fredericks, a "townie" who was Kyle's boyhood friend. For the Castletons, the fierce struggle to keep control of Kyle's inheritance from his "outsider" widow becomes a trial by fire. For the principled young deputy sheriff Wyn Ainsley, the case is his own dramatic rite of passage.