Brattleboro is the epitome of scenic Vermont. Quaint in its architecture and plainspoken in its politics, it dominates the state's southeast corner. And yet there is darkness here, too, and nobody knows it better that veteran cop Joe Gunther. Over the years, he has battled drug pushers, corporate swindlers and foiled gangs...but hasn't always come out on top. Thirty years earlier, shop owner Klaus Oberfeldt was robbed and beaten senseless. When Klaus died six months later, a case of assault and battery became murder. The guilty man eventually appeared, but Gunther, distracted by his wife's losing struggle with cancer in the same hospital where Klaus was slipping from life, did something he would always regret: he let the case go cold. Now reopened, the Oberfeldt investigation forces Gunther to open old wounds.
