Jim Cobb is incapacitated by grief at the loss of his wife and young daughter in a head-on crash with a long-distance trucker and car accident as they drove to Los Angeles. His continual drinking since the accident is compounded by the return, after fifteen years, of a killer who murdered five drifters between 1932 and 42 by hanging.
Jim then learns his best friend and ex-deputy is found dead in his car. Though initially a suicide, Jim realizes it was murder. Solve the murders his father couldn't find out who killed his friend, plus solve a series of petty thefts occurring at the desert movie locations.
Jim works hard to find the murderers, which he does, not knowing until the end of the book that there is a serial killer loose in Inyo County and the surrounding area, preying on single individuals out alone.
