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

It's another Fourth of July in Dacus, South Carolina and the carnival fright house isn't impressing Avery's 7-year-old niece Emma. That is, until the leg falls off a mannequin posed with a chainsaw. Then even Emma recognizes the human leg bone protruding from the wizened limb.

The next day, Avery joins her sister Lydia and her brother-in-law at a faculty picnic up on the mountain. The festivities are interrupted when one of the faculty wives