Along with the sweltering heat of the Mississippi pine barrens, the summer of 1963 brings intruders to Kali Oka Road: The Blood of the Redeemer churchers, members of a secretive religious sect, and Nadine Andrews, a single woman of marrying age more interested in her horses than starting a family. Both threaten the predictable sameness of this rural, tightly knit community. And both provide irresistible temptation for thirteen-year-old Bekkah Rich, who is willing to risk hell fire in her efforts to spy on the newcomers. But then her best friend's baby sister disappears, surrounding Bekkah in a web of kidnapping and murder. Suddenly, summertime antics become deadly serious, and those who were once a curiosity are now tainted with evil.

The Deep South never gets any deeper than 1920s Jexville, Mississippi, of Carolyn Haines' novel Touched. Dirt poor Mattie is the arranged bride of the town's barber Elikah, who is prone to deliver vicious beatings to his young wife. When a little girl is struck by lightning at a party and not only survives, but seems to have attained the ability to predict the future, Jexville is turned on its ear. The townspeople believe that the child is probably in league with the devil and that she and her mother are a danger. Mattie befriends the pair, earning punishment at the hands of her husband before winning freedom for herself and her newfound friends.

Dixon Sinclair arrives in Jexville, Mississippi, the town of her forebears, to find solace, stop drinking, and rebuild her life after her father’s murder. As the new publisher of the weekly newspaper and a second-generation journalist, she’s determined to ignite the political will of the townspeople and expose the corruption of the old guard. She forms an uneasy partnership with Sheriff J.D. Horton, another prodigal son returned hoping to find peace and a sense of fulfillment by keeping his town safe. Then two teenage girls disappear from a sandbar on the swift-moving Pascagoula River, and fears surface that evil lurks in the depths of the swampland—an evil consumed with rage against betrayal and an insatiable desire for vengeance. Suspicions fall on a mysterious transient, a young man running from a violent past in the Catholic Church of Mexico. Yet J.D. and Dixon discover that many there in Jexville have been betrayed, innocents suffering the sins of the fathers. Now they must find out who is willing to kill for revenge.