The Reckoning

Pete Banning is the pride of Clanton, Mississippi's neighbor in Ford County: a war hero home from the fighting, a farmer, a father, and a faithful Methodist who heads one of the town's prominent families. Everyone knows him and everyone trusts him.

One cool October morning in 1946, he gets up early, drives into town and walks into the church. There he calmly shoots and kills the Reverend Dexter Bell.

The killing is only part of the puzzle. Pete will not explain it. To the sheriff, his defense attorney, the judge, his family, his friends and the people of Clanton, he gives the same answer: he has nothing to say.

The novel opens as a crime story built on a missing motive, with a respected man on one side and a murdered minister on the other. The question driving it is why a man with so much standing would kill, and why he refuses to speak in his own defense. The case becomes the most mysterious crime Ford County has known.