Omaha, 1930. PI Jim Beely’s life wasn’t a peach to begin with. And now there’s a dead guy in his backseat. The last thing he needs to deal with is a cop --- much less the notoriously crooked Frank Tvrdik. But where a square-dealing lawman would see homicide, Frank spots opportunity. He can make the body disappear. All Jim needs to do is double-cross a politician bent on shuttering Omaha’s speakeasies, some of the few places to make an illegal, honest living in a city that’s a racket. After the double-cross goes haywire, Jim gets his bell rung in a bizarre attack. A man on his payroll turns up dead. And Jim and Frank form an unlikely alliance, digging for the reality behind patently false headlines. All the while, the death toll mounts, outmatched only by the absurdity of it all. As the clock runs down, Jim and Frank must make a choice that can’t be unmade.

In a dusty town in Nebraska’s rugged sandhills, sheriff’s deputy Harley Jensen patrols the streets at night, on the lookout for something to take his mind off the past, which weighs him down like an anvil. And he’s not the only one --- Pickard County is full of restless souls looking for change. Pam bristles against her role as wife and mother, hemmed in by the tragic history of the Reddick family, which is still coping, decades later, with the murder of one of its own. Her husband, Rick, bows beneath the pressures of raising a family while struggling with the wreckage of his youth. And then there’s Paul, the youngest Reddick, town miscreant and flint to Harley’s steel --- and in this stark, Shakespearean drama, it’s just a matter of time until their conflict throws the spark that will burn Pickard County to the ground.