No one was surprised when Aaron Crown was arrested for the decades-old murder of the most famous black civil rights leader in Louisiana. After all, his family were shiftless timber people who brought their ways into the Cajun wetlands, trailing rumors of ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Only Dave Robicheaux, to whom Crown proclaims his innocence, worries that Crown had been made a scapegoat for the collective guilt of a generation. But when Buford LaRose, scion of an old Southern family and author of a book that sent Crown to prison, is elected governor, strange things start to happen.