Adam Hall, a young lawyer in a giant Chicago firm, takes on one of the toughest assignments anyone could undertake - defending a convicted murderer on Mississippi's Death Row His client, seventy-year-old Sam Cayhill, killed two Jewish children in a 1967 Ku Klux Klan bombing Cayhill's appeals have nearly run their course and he prefers to argue the last alone Hating lawyers and Northern liberals, he has sacked Adam's firm from the case, but Adam has a secret which will persuade Sam to hire him and let him investigate the murders - he is the old man's estranged grandson