There are the invisible members of society; they exist all around us. Most of the time, we walk by them, seeing but not seeing. Augustus Purce learned long ago that the best means of avoiding unwanted attention was to become one of the invisible. He does it so well that even in his tiny village, everyone runs to the other side of Main Street to avoid him. For if they bothered to look more closely, which Augustus emphatically does NOT want, they might see him.
Everyone knows that Augustus went off to war against the South, and came back when their sons, fathers, and brothers did not. He knows it too. Hiding is the only way he can survive.
But now it is eleven years on from the end of the war, the nation is celebrating its Centennial soon, and someone has the poor taste to turn up dead in the house of one of the more esteemed families in the village. Augustus forces himself from hiding in order to catch a murderer, only to find that he must confront the unpleasantness of the past.