At dawn on an early June morning, a body lies on the tenth green of an elite golf club in the hills of New England. Golf balls fill the dead man's mouth; crusted blood encircles the bullet hole his forehead. Vincent Nardi, once a homicide detective with the NYPD and now chief of police for town of Abenaki, sees his dream of a laid-back second career fading as he gazes at the corpse. Things get complicated when he learns that the victim was the son of the most powerful man in town andwhen the man insists Nardi use the services of his former partner, a woman with whom he shares a tangled sexual history. As Nardi works to solve the murder, he finds himself encountering soldiers suffering the anguish of their combat experiences, a psychiatrist determined to help the young men and a priest with confessional knowledge of a second killing about to happen. DiClerico deftly weaves together a cast of small-town characters who alternate between helping and thwarting Nardi as he races towards the explosive conclusion of this debut novel.