When Detective Sergeant Duncan Hatcher is summoned to the home of Judge Cato Laird in the middle of the night to investigate a fatal shooting, he knows that discretion and kid-glove treatment are the keys to staying in the judge's good graces and keeping his job. At first glance, the case appears open-and-shut: Elise, the judge's trophy wife, interrupted a burglary in progress and killed the intruder in self-defense. But Duncan is immediately suspicious...

Forty-two-year-old Jessie is summoned home to Egret Island off the coast of South Carolina after her obsessively devout mother inexplicably cuts off her own finger, and finds herself oddly exhilarated to be free of her husband, and wildly attracted to Brother Thomas, a monk who has yet to take his final vows.