Nine-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; now he's alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake. A sudden noise distracts him, and all goes dark. Darren Matthews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness. After the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of rebuilding, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother. She now holds the key to his freedom, and is not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage. Levi's disappearance has links to Darren's last case, and to a wealthy businesswoman --- the boy's grandmother --- who seems more concerned about the fate of her business than that of her grandson.

When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules --- a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders --- a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman --- have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes --- and save himself in the process --- before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.

When a girl goes missing on Election Night, 1996, in the neighborhood of Pleasantville, Jay Porter is deeply disturbed. She was a volunteer for one of the local mayoral candidates, and her disappearance complicates an already heated campaign. When the nephew of one of the candidates is arrested, Jay reluctantly finds himself serving as a defense attorney. With a man’s life and his own reputation on the line, Jay is about to try his first murder in a case that will also put an electoral process on trial.

Caren Gray manages Belle Vie, a sprawling antebellum plantation that has turned into an eerie tourist attraction. Outside the gates, a corporation has been snapping up land from struggling families who have been growing sugar cane for generations and replacing local employees with illegal laborers. Tensions mount when the body of a female migrant worker is found in a shallow grave on the edge of the property, her throat cut clean.

Jay Porter has long since made peace with not living the American Dream. He runs his fledgling law practice out of a dingy Houston strip mall --- where his most promising client is a low-rent call girl --- and he's determined to leave the sins of his past buried: the guns, the FBI file, the trial that nearly destroyed him. That is, until the night he saves a woman from drowning and inadvertently opens a Pandora's box. Her secrets reach into the upper echelons of Houston's corporate power brokers and ensnare Jay in a murder investigation that could cost him his practice, his family…even his life.