Fever Devilin is a folklorist and a very recent ex-academic who has decided to return to his family home in the Georgia Appalachians. But his homecoming isn't quite what he expected---he arrives at the home he once shared with his now-deceased parents to find a corpse on his front porch, evidence that someone has been living in the house without his knowledge, and someone in the woods around the house taking shots at him with a rifle. Simply put, it could be better.. Instead it gets worse---especially when Fever finds out that the corpse is that of a half-brother whom he never knew existed. This discovery leads him to think that the actual intended target of the murderer might well have been Fever himself. As he probes the mystery in this tight-knit and often closed-mouthed community, home to many of his best and worst memories, it quickly becomes ovious that there are some of the town's secrets are deadlier than others. And the answers to his questions---about the murder and about Fever's own past---are
