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 chance to be a part of a headline-grabbing case against a drug company has lured attorney Avery Andrews back to Charleston, South Carolina. She agrees to meet with Mark Tilman, a young doctor from her hometown who seems to have something on his mind. When he doesn't show, she figures he stood her up and takes comfort in the stilt restaurant's she-crab soup. But it turns out he had a fatal car accident. Something about the crash isn't right,
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