Michael Beck

Ray Atlee is a professor of law, he's forty-three, newly single, and still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. He has a younger brother, Forrest, who redefines the notion of a family's black sheep. His father, Judge Atlee, has become a recluse. With the end in sight, he issues a summons for both sons to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of his estate.

In 1946 Clanton, Mississippi, World War II hero Pete Banning calmly and inexplicably kills his pastor and friend, the Reverend Dexter Bell, and refuses to defend his actions during the subsequent trial.