When three Marine buddies take a leave of absence together, they go home to help with hurricane recovery, never expecting to run into anything more troublesome than helping raise and repair a few flooded boats, still sunk at the docks.

Labelle is a quiet rural town on the Caloosahatchee River, with a roughly equal mix of white, black, and Hispanic residents, along with a small contingent of indigenous people, mostly Seminole, where nearly everyone is involved in agriculture, and where everyone knows one another, and friends are more like family, regardless of heritage.

So when racial anxiety rises after a string of arson fires, the whole Hendry County population becomes nervous and alarmed.
Tensions rise, with Jesse McDermitt, and his friends Rusty Thurman and Billy Rainwater thrust right into the middle of it.

In a high-stakes game of watching and being watched, everyone is suspect. Big Citrus to the west and Big Sugar to the east are both trying to hold the lid on the workforce. Or are they?

Who wins in a battle of culture versus progress? But more importantly…
Who will die?