In Twenty Mile Bottom, Mississippi, a grandmother mysteriously disappears. Her 18-year-old grandson, Roy Gene, smells a rat and launches his own investigation. Unbeknownst to him is a domestic terrorist plot masked by a renegade religious cult run by a gypsy fortuneteller and his alcoholic evangelist grandfather. The grandfather's infamous Halloween service, “The Devil Walks at Midnight” is the emotional lynch pin to a corrupt theology of fear that keeps everyone in line … except Roy Gene's grandmother … and Roy Gene.

Others smell a rat, too. Federal investigator Chase Hightower, probing why Twenty Mile Bottom has over 500 disability cases of paranoid schizophrenia, crosses paths with Roy Gene and the two join forces. As conspiracies unravel and murders are solved, all hell, literally, breaks loose as Twenty Mile Bottom goes up in a cataclysmic explosion and conflagration.

The narrative takes the reader though a rollicking farcical world of hilarity and pathos, and of sin and redemption, with glimpses into the world of disability fraud, domestic terrorism, and unsung disability investigators.