"One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface because Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude....

When the site of his daughter's upcoming wedding burns down, Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire and his friend, Henry Standing Bear, witness the falling death of a young Crow woman and are recruited into an investigation that incites the wrath of the bride-to-be.