Growing up in a small North Carolina town, Jess Hall is plunged into an adulthood for which he is not prepared when his autistic older brother, Stump, sneaks a look at something he is not supposed to see, which has catastrophic repercussions.

When the roar of a low-flying plane awakens him in the middle of the night, Sheriff Winston Barnes knows something strange is happening at the nearby airfield on the coast of North Carolina. But nothing can prepare him for what he finds: a large airplane has crash-landed and is now sitting sideways on the runway, and there are no signs of a pilot or cargo. When the body of a local man is discovered-shot dead and lying on the grass near the crash site-Winston...