It’s 1991 in the relaxed coastal community of Tim’s Bayou, Florida. John Weber, a sharp-witted, deceptively laid-back Atlanta police detective, has returned with eight-year-old daughter Lainie for his mother Sara’s funeral. But John’s bittersweet homecoming takes a shocking turn when close friend Jennifer Marlowe is murdered in the brackish waters near a long-abandoned inn, where the two were drinking and reminiscing just hours earlier.

As the local authorities investigate, John becomes obsessed—only mildly, he insists—with the possibility that Jennifer’s killer is somehow implicated in the disappearance of John’s girlfriend years earlier. While he races to expose the unknown assailant and clear his own name, John must grapple with his own painful past, too.