Avery Andres has just been downsized from her job in a law office in a North Carolina city and has returned to her small home town to lick her wounds and consider, with hesitation, trying to set up a law practice there. She quickly gets a client or two, and immediately the company building owned by one is destroyed by arson, and the body found inside was quite probably murdered. Meanwhile, an old high-school classmate has told the entire county

A runaway pig is about as explosive a piece of news as there is to be found in Dacus at the moment. But shortly after Avery Andrews has returned to her hometown, all hell breaks loose.

Her new office is still in disorder when Maggy Avinger arrives, clutching a copy of her dead husband's letter to his lawyer. He's made arrangements for an enormous stone angel to be erected at his grave and for the angel's plaque to read that Maggy murdered