Keith Landry has lived long enough to have seen the end of the cold war; a war fought without uniforms or rules, a war that has claimed his career and his soul. Now, he has come home to Spencerville, a town in the American heartland that is both familiar and strange, a town as tarnished as Landry himself. But for Landry, Spencerville has one attraction that time has not corrupted. Her name is Annie Prentis, and she had been the one pure love of his youth. Then came Vietnam, and a world gone crazy separated them. Annie had long since married Cliff Baxter, the town's chief of police and its most powerful man, an unfaithful, yet brutally possessive husband, a force more dangerous than any Landry has met on the fields of battle.