Slightly steamy southern thriller about a decades-old murder that's also a family drama set in a town full of secrets and corruption, steeped in racism (and resentment at being seen as corrupt and racist by the surely just as corrupt and racist North) and pretty darn miffed at having the past dug up. It's entertaining stuff. The narrator/hero, a legal paragon and bestselling popular author no less, is full of himself, but gets cut down a peg or two often enough to keep him likeable. 

It's all solidly entertaining and enthralling, and moves along at an amazing pace after the more stately opening. When people aren't shooting at him, they're warning him or waylaying him or setting his house on fore or iinexplicably trying to kindle a long-dead romance that left scars while the plot twists and turns and ploughs irrevocably to what you know from early on is going to be a climactic courtroom battle. It's smart, which is something I've really come to apreciate over a lot of other qualities in the books I enjoy, and well written. 

Published in 1999, some of the way it treats race raises eyebrows because critiques of well-worn tropes have penetrated much further now than they had then. But I think it plays fair and wears its heart on its sleeve. Oh, it also does that thing where every woman's relative attractiveness is detailed and catalogued and assessed, but as characters they're as well drawn as the men.