When small-town newspaper reporter Rick Hoskins gets physically assaulted along a rural Texas road, he thinks the time has come for him to hang up his pen and notepad. Before he can tender his resignation, though, a police officer's house is burned to the ground, a confidential informant is murdered, his mother is run off the highway, and Rick's editor is found dead in a garage (apparently from carbon monoxide poisoning).
Rick finds himself forced to stick it out at the paper, shaking off nightmares and a Pandora's Box of personal demons as he struggles to find out who is behind the violence that is pulling his town apart by the seams - and what their ultimate goal may be.