Sylvia Thorn, circuit court judge in Palm Beach County, Florida, takes an unexpected trip to Illinois when her older brother, Willie Grisseljon, is confined to a county hospital for psychiatric evaluation. A Vietnam veteran with a few lingering side effects from the war, Willie was on vacation, exploring the countryside where he and Sylvia had grown up. There he found a body, and when he tried to report his discovery to a deputy sheriff, he was locked up as a vagrant with delusions.
Willie is released from the hospital when Sylvia arrives. Sylvia is reluctantly drawn into the mystery when Willie insists on returning to the site where the body is hidden. Soon, the two discover clues about the murdered farm manager and his wife, a tenant farmer, concealed Indian artifacts, and uprooted prairie grass plots that may help the sheriff, Trace Parker, solve the crime. But Sylvia runs into trouble when she's caught nosing around the old homestead, and while she hides, she overhears another murder take place.
She escapes, only to find there are more gun-toting suspects who seem to want Sylvia and Willie out of the way, even after the sheriff permits them to leave Illinois and return to their Florida home. A mysterious new neighbor with a menacing bodyguard, and new information Sylvia finds in her legal system database, provide her just enough information to further jeopardize her life. Sylvia must use her contacts with the Illinois sheriff and Florida security personnel, as well as Willie's intuitive skills, to remove the threat to herself and her family, and provide the missing links to state and federal authorities to capture the killer.
