The chance discovery of a young girl's skeleton at a construction site in the small Arkansas delta town of Split Tree is anything but routine. Evidence found with the decades-old bones is seemingly linked to a recent death, one that the local sheriff is all too quick to pass of as a suicide, and it soon falls upon Split Tree's war-haunted police chief, Big Ray Elmore, to investigate. When Big Ray's probing begins to pierce the delicate social façade that the townspeople have maintained for years, wheels are set in motion; wheels that threaten to crush anyone in their path.