Nothing much happens in Versailles, Maine. Until a body is found in a cabin up by the lake. The dead man turns out to be from the Boston DA's office, a prosecutor who had been investigating a series of gang-related murders in that city. Ben Truman, Chief of Police, heads down to Boston to follow the few fragile leads he has in the case. Not welcomed by the police there, he knows he really should get the message and disappear back to the sticks. Big city crime is way beyond anything he's ever dealt with before.

But still Truman refuses to let it go. With the help of a retired cop who knows all the angles, he becomes embroiled in an investigation which has its roots in a sequence of deaths which began twenty years previously...