Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a head wound in battle. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but John's sister and her family had been murdered. Their killer wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down. Traveling through the unforgiving landscape of a shattered nation in the midst of Reconstruction, John trails Dodd deep into Texas, accepting that this final reckoning between them may cost him more than all he's already lost.