“Gripping . . . A potent account of the crime and its aftermath, placing its story of heartbreaking violence and injustice in a larger portrait of a rural American town.”—The Wall Street Journal

The harrowing true story of a cold-blooded murder and the campaign to bring justice to a suffering Midwestern town

On a November night in 1990, Cathy Robertson is murdered in her home outside Chillicothe, Missouri. After law enforcement conduct a haphazard investigation, the sheriff’s office puts the case in the hands of a Kansas City private eye with his own agenda. In a close-knit town still reeling from the aftereffects of the farming crisis, friends and neighbors abruptly fracture into opposing camps. Mark Woodworth, a Robertson family neighbor, eventually receives four life sentences for a crime that a growing group of local supporters believe he didn’t commit.

In a surprising, dramatic narrative that spans decades, Mark’s family turns to Robert Ramsey, an attorney willing to take on a corrupt political machine suppressing the truth. But the community’s way of life is irrevocably damaged by the parallel tragedies of the farming crisis and Cathy’s unsolved murder, in a gripping story about the fault-lines of a fracturing America that continue to cut across the farm belt today.

"The harrowing true story of a cold-blooded murder and its tragic aftermath-and the stunning revelations that would emerge decades later On a cold November night in 1990, an intruder entered Cathy and Lyndel Robertson's Missouri home while the couple and their children slept. Leaving the safe full of cash undisturbed, the person snuck into the main bedroom and fired at point-blank range, killing Cathy and injuring Lyndel. The investigation that followed swept up the entire region in a hunt for the killer. But police resources quickly ran low, and soon the Robertson case was in the hands of a private eye whose interests were dangerously wrapped up in a local business dispute and shady politics. In a town still recovering from the farming crisis of the 1980s, bonds were frayed and neighbors turned on each other. The wrong young man ended up with four life sentences, and the initial suspect-the boyfriend of Cathy and Lyndel's eldest daughter-would be largely forgotten. In a triumphant resolution that takes decades to arrive, the web of corruption and buried evidence is finally untangled when the seemingly unwinnable case is taken on by Robert Ramsey, an attorney with an independent streak and a powerful conscience. But even then, the successful appeal deepens the divides in the formerly close-knit town. The trauma left behind by the parallel tragedies of the farming crisis and the unsolved murder irreparably damages the community's way of life-and raises crucial questions about the moral code of conduct of our entire nation"--