Cam Richter

When two lowlifes rob a gas station, murder the attendant, and then incinerate bystanders who are filling up their minivan, the Manceford County, North Carolina, police quickly arrest the killers at a nearby motel.

Summoned by a friend, ex-cop Cam Richter agrees to do a favor: investigate the assault of a young woman in a remote area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Cam knows the misty hills and shadowed hollers of the park, and his outdoor skills might break a case that local cops can't - or maybe don't want to - solve.

A private detective working in Wilmington, North Carolina, is found dead in a gas-station restroom, apparently poisoned. But when her body sets off radiation alarms in the pathologist's office, suspicion falls on the nearby Helios nuclear power plant, a heavily guarded facility with supposedly fail-safe procedures.

Cam Richter, needing a break from his too eventful detective career, is in search of more peaceful pastures in the North Carolina countryside. He buys a 700-acre antebellum plantation, the perfect location for restful solitude, but it doesn't take long for him to discover that his new locale is not as quiet as he'd hoped. Almost immediately, Cam finds himself caught up in mischievous pranks around his land, the site of a Civil War-era massacre.