A young Vietnamese immigrant is brutally slaughtered by a crossbow. The prime suspect is a ruthless member of a white supremacy group. When attorney Ben Kincaid reluctantly agrees to confer with the presumed murderer, he encounters a chilling certainty: an innocent man has been cast as a scapegoat. To rebalance the scales of justice, Ben chooses to represent the accused man--thereby placing both attorney and client at the explosive center of a community torn apart by xenophobia, racism, and violence. But the real fireworks will go off in court--in an incendiary murder trial with more twists than a dustbowl tornado.