Famous mystery novelist Walker Redgrave is dead, an apparent suicide in a dingy motel room in a roughneck fishing village on the Panhandle coast of Florida.

Atlanta private detective and former college professor Bennett Cole is reading the jolting headlines when Redgrave's widow walks into his office. Redgrave could not have taken his own life, she says. He had plans, too much to live for.

So Cole takes his first big case after more than nine years of peeping through windows and following errant spouses during late-night trysts. From the news accounts, it appears clear-cut that the novelist took his own life. The room was locked, the gun still in his cold hand.

But this is no open-and-shut case, and, as Cole comes to realize, there is a lot more to Redgrave's suicide than is contained in the police reports. Cole's search for the truth leads him deep into the Florida backwoods, to places rarely touched by the law, and where men will kill to hide any number of secrets.