In a hot Arizona river basin, three bodies sway from ropes: men executed by their fellow ranchers. Hundreds of miles away, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Deputy Marshal Luther Haskill hunts down a killer. But he is about to be chosen for a new mission: Major Gerald Bowen wants Haskill to go undercover and find out if the Arizona lynchings were a matter of justice or murder. Bowen is on a campaign to bring law to the frontier, and Haskill is the right agent to investigate the deaths. But Luther comes up against a wall of silence and a family guarding a deadly secret. And in a land where some people get second chances and some don't get any, Luther Haskill must make his way through the good, the bad, and the damned--in pursuit of a cold-blooded killer with a plan of his own.