Suzanne Vail, a professor at a Calgary university, becomes obsessed with the 1889 murder of the Cree teenager Rosalie New Grass in the upstairs rooms of the Turf Club Saloon. Govier demonstrates her gifts as a researcher as she recreates the event that inflamed the fledgling town of Calgary in 1889. When a heroic French-Canadian frontier judge locked up the jury rather than let the murderer go free, there came a reckoning. Suzanne, too, must decide what to do about the men in her own life.