Earl Marcus thought he had left the mountains of Georgia behind forever, and with them, the painful memories of a childhood spent under the fundamentalist rule of his father RJ's church--a church built on fear, penance, and the twisting, writhing mass of snakes. But then an ominous photo of RJ is delivered to Earl's home. The photograph is dated long after his father's burial, and there's no doubt that the man in the picture is very much alive.

After losing a hotly contested sheriff's race to the lackey of corrupt politician Jeb Walsh, Earl Marcus has had the worst summer of his life. But worst turns deadly when a body turns up on Earl's front lawn, accompanied by a cryptic letter. Earl finds a cell phone in the victim's car and tracks it to the Harden School, an old, isolated campus surrounded by barbed wire and locked gates, and catches a sneak peek at a file labeled "Complaints", where...