July 1970. The Nihilistics walk into a local bank with a hatchet, Colt Government and horse bone knife. In a bloodbath they take out four people, two of whom are related to Sheriff Strake. A roving ex-sniper in Vietnam, he has come back to his home outside Athens, Georgia, only to find himself in a hunt for the killing trio.

Justice turns nebulous as he somehow ends up in a Bronx motel on a different kind of chase, tracking the suits to a mysterious house. More carnage.

Battered, he drives back south to his office and runs into the governor's niece waiting for him with an ultimatum. The suits, he begins to find, are not what they seem.

But the more he tries to distance himself from the cold violence of The Nihilistics . . . the more he turns into them.