Los Angeles TV journalist Beatrice Middleton has lost her job. With a possible employment offer in Atlanta, she heads home to Savannah, Georgia, to reconnect with her contentious African-American family, arriving to find that her 15-year-old nephew has been murdered. This begins the unraveling of a cloak of family secrets surrounding another devastating crime, one that shattered Bea's world when she was a teen. The traumatic memory has been buried so deep it almost feels like it never happened-Almost. Humiliated by Bea years earlier, a psychotic Special Ops vet who makes his living moving heroin and specializing in "wet work" has returned to seek retribution. Meanwhile, Bea's son Dexter, an aspiring documentary filmmaker, and his friend discover an eye-witness connection to his cousin's homicide. After a rookie attempt at surveilling the perpetrator, the youngsters disappear. Bea and her brother, Sheriff Luther Middleton-along with their quirky friends and family-work together to find the killer, stop a major drug deal, and rescue Bea's son held hostage in a nightmarish landscape of black water rivers, tidal creeks, and drug-fueled cruelty.