It’s almost Thanksgiving and Hollis Joplin, death investigator for the Milton County ME’s Office in Atlanta, is looking forward to the holiday season, not to mention his wedding to Carrie Salinger in the spring. But Joplin’s rare sense of optimism is shattered one morning when he receives what appears to be a set of crime scene photos. The victim in the pictures turns out to be a former girlfriend, and her fiancé, a prominent attorney, becomes the chief suspect. The dead woman’s father, a retired Marine Corps general, wants Joplin to be part of the investigation. Concerned that the person who sent him the photos is trying to implicate him in the murder, and even more concerned the murderer may be someone very close to him, he agrees.

Meanwhile, hotshot lawyer, sometime friend, and occasional bane of Joplin’s existence Tom Halloran becomes involved in the appeal of a TV star’s conviction for murdering his wife. The case is eerily similar to Joplin’s: in both murders the suspects are black, the dead women are white, and the victims were strangled. Reluctantly as always, Joplin and Halloran begin to share information.

Against a backdrop of racial tension in a community that’s becoming polarized by newspaper headlines describing a “modern-day Othello,” the two men attempt to discover whether both murders were committed by the same person. When more deaths occur the answer seems clear—but as both men have discovered in the past, appearances can be deceiving, and villainy comes disguised in many forms.