What would you be prepared to risk to follow your conscience? How do the members of a family cope with their own personal grief when one of them dies in tragic circumstances? Should the will of the state always supersede personal morality and religious belief?

It is 2004. Andrew Burke, an idiosyncratic but brilliant Irish academic, has a chance encounter with an escaped death row inmate in America's deep south after a devastating hurricane. He makes the momentous decision to help the injured prisoner evade his inevitable fate. The events Andrew sets in motion cause him to lock horns with a powerful politician whose family is coming to terms with the drug fueled death by suicide of his daughter. To help him and the prisoner he enlists the assistance of Susan Aldershot, a veterinarian, in his scheme to get Williams across the border and into Canada.