When Rolson McKane stumbles onto the body in the juke joint across the woods, he never expects to be pulled into a world of small-town secrets, murder, and corruption. But after he discovers that no one seems to care about young Emmitt Laveau, turns out solving the mystery is mostly up to him. The visions and supernatural encounters at the heart of his discovery seem to exist halfway between dreams and reality, and Rolson can't quite tell the difference anymore. Once a police officer in Lumber Junction, Georgia, Rolson is unemployed and mostly inebriated all the time. His suspension from the force was the result of drunkenly sideswiping a woman's car with his own, a seemingly random act of negligence, until she comes to visit him one day for a solemn favor. Meanwhile, his ex-wife, Vanessa, has reappeared out of nowhere, hell-bent on getting her life together, as Rolson slowly destroys his. He can't bring himself to tell her about the dreams, the ghosts, the people who seem to be following him. Not that he's a stranger to misery. The son of a son of a long line of drunks, he's been haunted his whole life, just not by ghosts. And though he'd rather not think about it, delving into his past might be the key to solving the entire mystery of Emmitt Laveau's death. The bodies start to pile up as Rolson uncovers the truth, investigating a murder no one seems to want solved, all while staying ahead of the corrupt and vindictive cops in local politician Leland Brickmeyer's back pocket. Driven by a personal need for redemption, perhaps as a means to erase his dark past, his only allies in the effort appear to be his bail bondsman, the woman he nearly killed, and the ghost of the victim, who visits him nightly in his dreams.