Cops run into all kinds of characters on the job. But when Chief Sam Jenkins meets four people from his former life as a New York detective, it throws him for a loop.
The first was a low level gangster named Carlo "Carly Nickels" DeCenzo—lying on a slab in the Blount County morgue with Sam's name and phone number written on a scrap of paper in his pocket. Next there's Gino Musucci, infamous New Jersey crime boss who says he wants to retire and relocate—to Sam's town of Prospect, Tennessee. And there's Dixie Foster, Sam's former secretary and the woman who wanted to steal him away from his wife. Sam wonders why she's turned up after eighteen years.

With Carly's murder still unsolved, another body shows up in a Prospect motel—that of a retired detective from Sam's past. And then Sam receives a letter from an old mobster who warns him about a contract on his life. Is this any way for a cop to spend his time on the "peaceful side of the Smokies?"