This is book 1 of the "Will Lee" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

His first novel, which he says took him 8 years to write. It tells the story of three chiefs of police in Delano Georgia (a fictional town that every single random side character in a Stone Barrington novel seems to come from), and the family history leading to Will Lee.

578 pages! Longer than most best-selling mystery authors can easily run to these days, and it was his first novel.

A little slow, but in many ways better than the later, more successful novels.

Some of the history of desegregation is wrapped into the plot; one of the characters is the first black chief of police in the south.

There's one local serial killer that ties all the plots together (in addition to just being sequentially set in the same town), and they actually get him in the end. Come awfully close a few times earlier.