In the early morning of October 25, 1988, a student jogging the placid campus of Vermeulen College, the prominent Catholic institution in Hampton, Indiana, discovers the body of the charismatic president of the college administered by the Congregation of St. John.

Roger Drouin, the college Chief of Police, is shaken. Five years earlier, he helped solve a sensational murder case in Rochester, Minnesota. Dispirited, he had left policing. Now he faces another tragic case, the murder of a priest, the friend who had brought him to Indiana.

Apart from having to deal with an ambitious college provost whose daughter is now missing, he must navigate a forced alliance with the cheerless but brilliant County Chief of Detectives and deal with a religious leader who may be obstructing justice.

He has to find answers to questions about a popular professor of English Literature and her cynical husband. But beyond investigating the facts of a crime, Roger Drouin must confront matters of the heart—those of the dead president, the woman who loved him, and himself.