On her nineteenth birthday, a girl jumps to her death from the window of a twenty-two story Dallas hotel. The ramifications of her suicide soon reach the backwaters of a rural God-fearing town ninety miles northeast of Dallas. In the early fifties, Mayweather, Texas, is a town where the social order is stratified, women are often objectified, people of color suffer from the sting and humiliation of racial oppression and seemingly ordinary lives often harbor dark secrets. Everything heats up when a shocking Polaroid photograph is discovered by a cleaning lady at the town's shabby and disheveled Lone Star Hotel. The image is pornographic. Protagonist J.B. Turman, likes to tie up loose ends and for things to make sense. He thinks he can recall having seen the girl in the photograph elsewhere. But, where and when? Disturbed by the image and the possibility that a pornographer is on the loose, he organizes a disparate group of citizens to investigate.