Ruby Bozarth, a newcomer to Rosedale, Mississippi, is also fresh to the Mississippi Bar--and to the docket of Circuit Judge Baylor, who taps Ruby as defense counsel in a racially charged felony. The murder of a woman from one of the town's oldest families has Rosedale's upper crust howling for blood, and the prosecutor is counting on Ruby's inexperience to help him deliver a swift conviction. Ruby's client is a college football star who has returned...

When a ten-year-old Black girl is brutally raped by two drunken white men in the small Southern town of Clanton, Mississippi, the ensuing tension and violence threatens to destroy the town.