Fifteen years after Rennell Price is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to die for the murder of a nine-year-old girl, lawyer Teresa Peralta Paget becomes convinced that Price did not receive a fair trial and fights to stop his execution.

In Steelton, a struggling Midwestern city on the cusp of an economic turnaround, two prominent men are found dead within days of each other. One is Tommy Fielding, a senior officer of the company building a new baseball stadium, the city's hope for the future. The other is Jack Novak, the local drug dealers' attorney of choice. Fielding's death with a prostitute, from an overdose of heroin, seems accidental; Novak is apparently the victim of a ritual...