Omaha, 1930. When ex-cop-turned-PI Jim Beely murders the man who assaulted his 14-year-old daughter, the last person he wants to see is local crooked cop Frank Tvrdik. Frank has a proposition: he’ll make the dead man disappear if Jim helps take down Elmer Kobb, who is vying for city commissioner and willing to backstab anyone who gets in his way. Soon, Jim and Frank are sucked into a seedy world of crime and corruption, where no one is safe and nothing is what it seems. Then Jim is violently attacked and one of his operatives turns up dead within the span of 12 hours, and his search for the truth yields a web of lies and a mounting death toll. As he and Frank are pulled deeper into the city’s dark underbelly and its absurd political machinations, Jim begins to question everything he knows about Omaha and his place in it.

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.