Al Barnes is a good but admittedly "mushy hearted" homicide cop who trades his stressful Seattle beat for a small-town deputy's life in rural Montana. The peace is disrupted when a local fisherman and a mill owner are found gruesomely axed. Barnes is drawn into a twenty-year-old unsolved case near Portland, adding to an already puzzling search through murky secrets and sweeping him up in the decadent "good life" of his suspects.