Yo-yos are the latest craze. Teenagers are mad for madras. JFK has faced down Castro and the French are fawning over the First Lady, but suburbanites in Charlotte, North Carolina, a big small town with aspirations, are building bomb shelters in the back yard. Things really heat up when John Lattimore, a wealthy local banker, is arrested for the murder of his mistress Delores Green. After exposing a scandal among management that destroyed his career and his wife’s, former newspaper reporter Steve Harlan is eking out a living as a private investigator, when an invitation to join the defense team offers him the big break he has been praying for. His jubilation is tempered, however, when he learns how heartlessly Lattimore has involved Delores’s 13-year-old son.
Lattimore admits bringing Delores’s body home and bullying her son into helping him make it appear she died a natural death, but claims she was a secret alcoholic who drank herself to death and all he’s guilty of is a cover up.
But the Medical Examiner says the 200 bruises on her body make it murder. Lattimore insists Delores acquired the bruises when she went missing two nights before her death, but the only witness who might confirm his story has also mysteriously disappeared.
Battling his ambivalence toward his client as well as the Prosecution, Steve races to unearth evidence that will save Lattimore from the gas chamber — and protect his own family from someone who will do anything to keep it hidden.
