In Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959 the Clutter family is murdered and Carly Fleming, recently arrived from New York, inserts herself into the investigation, along with New Yorker writer Truman Capote.

"Andrew Carnegie funded fifty-nine public libraries in Kansas in the early 20th century, but it was frontier women who organized waffle suppers, minstrel shows, and women's baseball games to buy books to fill them. Now, a century later, Angelina returns to her father's hometown of New Hope to complete her dissertation on the Carnegie libraries, just as Traci and Gayle arrive in town, Traci as an artist-in-residence at the renovated Carnegie Arts Center...

After serving a term in prison for killing a man in a poker game, Vern Balance finds himself forced to remain in the same town with the dead man's father -- a cattle town ripe for violence.

When he decides to turn his fifth grade teacher's love of the dictionary around on her, clever Nick Allen invents a new word and begins a chain of events that quickly moves beyond his control.