Morgan's Crossing, California – home to blue skies and sunshine, cows grazing peacefully side by side with their calves, and an itinerant cowboy whose eyes remind Bri of a death row inmate she's seen recently on tv.

Nasty, nasty stuff. All of it. Even if the cowboy is a hunk.

When Briana – tarantula in hand and boa in bag – arrives in the teeny, tiny can't-believe-people-live-here town, she has two goals in mind: sell her aunt's estate and get back to the city in time for her gallery debut.

She doesn't count on being saddled with a hundred-year old Victorian two-story that definitely looks like it's seen better days and a mini-Sherlock Holmes who sees criminal activity around every corner.

According to little Johnny Jacobson, the most recent bull stomping is really a murder. He believes her aunt was murdered too. Problem is – he can't get anyone to believe him. Bri quickly realizes Johnny Jacobson could be right. The town is full of suspicious types: Arin Conners, the real estate broker who wears a lumberjack shirt and grabs unsuspecting girls with his hook-like prosthesis; the super-size sheriff whose bark is worse than his bite; the woman with the nasty black dogs who just happens to be married to the grumpy sheriff.

And then there's that cowboy with the dead eyes.

It's hard to keep her mind on funeral preparations, a chore she totally dreads, and Bri finds herself intrigued, repulsed, and angered at the thought that her aunt might really have been murdered. Johnny has proof, or so he claims. Bri decides to back the boy up. That's when she finds out the sheriff has a temper.

And he isn't afraid to use it.

Then Arin Connors drives his car off a cliff. Another accident?

Johnny doesn't think so. Neither does Bri.

There's a killer at work in Morgan's Crossing.

But how can they prove it?

The world turns completely mad when Bri's jeep is raked by gunfire the way to her aunt's house. As the Jeep's engine dies, she escapes up the hill to her house, only to find her friend unconscious on the kitchen floor, her mother in the hands of a madwoman, and little Johnny Sherlock missing. She puts her trust in the dead-eyed cowboy, a trust that could prove her undoing.