From critically acclaimed author Steve Yarbrough comes this riveting, beautifully nuanced, new novel of life in a small town.

After twenty-five years away and an illicit scandal in California, Dr. Pete Barrington is returning home to Loring, Mississippi, where football rules and religious piety mingles uncomfortably with darker human impulses. Though Barrington sets up a small practice and finds solace in an old friend, his wife, Angela, and daughter, Toni, are having trouble adjusting. Also, Barrington's homecoming has awakened difficult memories for Alan DePoyster, a former high school classmate and now a pillar of the community, who blames Barrington for tearing apart his family. When DePoyster's son and Barrington's daughter begin a fledgling relationship, the children are forced to pay for their parents' sins, and things take a disastrous, even shocking turn.

Born in the Delta town of Indianola, Mississippi, Steve Yarbrough now lives with his wife and their two daughters in Fresno, California, where he teaches at the university. His recent fiction has also been published in England, Holland, and Poland.