It is 1935 and Joe Bennett is a straight-arrow town sheriff who must investigate the death of a man everyone wanted dead.
One day, Bill Cooper, the meanest man in town, is found beaten and murdered. The suspect list is the size of the Oklahoma county where he lives. It soon becomes clear that many of Sheriff Joe Bennet's friends know something about the death of Bill Cooper and are keeping quiet about it.
Someone--Joe hopes it isn't one of his friends--tries to kill him. To add to Joe's problems, a beautiful young girl is found dead. Her parents are telling people she fell out of a barn but she doesn't look like she died that way. She looks murdered and the only man mean enough to do something like that has been dead for days.
Joe struggles against his own ignorance about how to conduct an investigation against the backdrop of a world devastated by the Great Depression. Without modern forensics and the tools of modern law enforcement, Joe must investigate a crime which nobody wants solved.