In 1970, Willie Traynor came to Mississippi in a Triumph Spitfire and a fog of vague ambitions. Within a year, the twenty-three-year-old college dropout found himself the owner of Ford County's only newspaper, famous for its well-crafted obituaries. While the rest of America was in the grips of social turmoil, Willie's adopted town of Clanton lived on the edge of another age, until the brutal murder of a young mother rocked the sleepy community-and thrust Willie into the center of a storm.

Daring to report the true horrors of the crime, Willie made as many friends as enemies in Clanton-and over the next decade he would take stances, break barriers, and sometimes wonder how he had gotten there in the first place. But he could never escape the crime that had shattered his innocence or the criminal whose evil had left an indelible stain. Because as the ghosts of the South's past gather around Willie, as issues of race and justice swirl around Clanton, men and women who served on a jury nine years ago are starting to die one by one-as a killer exacts the ultimate revenge. . . .