Dr. Lee Brazil, a southern refuge, has never made peace with the South he grew up in as a child born without a left hand; nor with the prosthetic hook he wears and the nuclear industry he blames for his disability. While researching material for his book, Ten Years in the Not So New South, in Pine Grove, Tennessee, the Atomic City, Lee attends a SOMOP meeting, Save Our Mountain and Our People, an activist group working to shut down the Pine Grove Labs incinerator for nuclear waste. When an explosion at the Labs occurs, Lee is caught up in the ensuing disaster and implicated in what is mistakenly believed to be a terrorist plot. Managing to escape local authorities, his harrowing journey back home to Maine forces him to seek refuge in a number of unlikely places and solicit help from a number of unlikely allies, including Jean Kudrick, the lost love of his youth. Now on the radar of federal agents tracking a terrorist cell in Boston, Lee is arrested before he reaches home. He is offered a deal: help the FBI foil a terrorist plot and avoid prosecution. In confronting the politics of fear, Lee must challenge his perception of good and evil and struggle with the disabling inner conflicts of his disability to determine his course in reaching home.