Returning from assignment in Afghanistan, foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is looking forward to a restful reentry at a friend's Montana cabin. Instead, she's greeted by her former colleague's corpse. Lola learns that Mary Alice had been writing for the local paper, digging into the past of Native American gubernatorial candidate Johnny Running Wolf. Lola doesn't trust that the local sheriff has the skills to find Mary Alice's killer, so she extends her stay and uses her investigative expertise to reconstruct Mary Alice's last days. She learns that there's a lot more than meets the eye going on in Magpie, Montana. Beyond the unemployment and the anti-meth billboards, there's big money to be made in the mountains—enough to kill for.