Chapter I

Reporter Brian Reed receives an email from John B. McLemore, a brilliant and deeply troubled horologist living in Woodstock, Alabama, who claims that a young man named Kabram Burt has gotten away with murder and that the entire town is complicit in the cover-up. Reed travels to Woodstock expecting a true crime investigation and instead finds something far more complex: a portrait of a man whose towering intellect is trapped in a place he despises, a town that defies easy coastal assumptions, and a story that will eventually become less about a murder and more about the hidden depths of a single extraordinary life.