After a near brush with death, Maddie Arnette heads to the charming coastal town of Cape Mayson, North Carolina to heal. She temporarily trades in her microphone for a paddleboard. But when she finds a dead man floating in the water, her sabbatical turns into a quest for the truth.

When the police call the death an accidental drowning, Maddie is not convinced. Everyone in the small town seems to know something about what happened, and they all seem scared. Maddie is determined to unravel the complicated web of secrets.

Maddie Arnette traded in her hard-news crime reporting for softer, feel-good features after her husband’s death. But her lifelong addiction to the dark side of journalism, bolstered by years of meeting sources in back alleys and visiting grisly crime scenes, still clamors for Maddie’s attention.

When Suzanne Parker falls to the pavement in front of Maddie during the Oak City Marathon, Maddie assumes it’s an accident. That is, until Suzanne whispers words that make Maddie’s skin go cold: my husband is trying to kill me.

Maddie Arnette has built her whole life around the narrative that her father murdered her mother. When a woman in the grocery store claims that Maddie’s father did not kill her mother, the revelation forces the journalist toward a reckoning. Is it possible that her father has sat in prison for almost forty years for a crime he did not commit? And if he didn’t do it, who did?