Through the summer twilight in the Depression-era South, word begins to circulate of a black man accosting a white woman. In no time the awful forces of public opinion and political expediency goad the separate fears and frustrations of a small southern community into the single-mindedness of a mob.

Erskine Caldwell shows the lynching of Sonny Clark through many eyes. However, Caldwell reserves some of his most powerful passages for the few who truly held Clark's life in their hands but let it go: people like Sheriff Jeff McCurtain, who did nothing to disperse the mob; Harvey Glenn, who found Clark in hiding and turned him in; and Katy Barlow, who withdrew her false charge of rape only after Clark was dead.