Since the hit-and-run murder of his wife five years ago, Rennie Cray has crisscrossed America in his souped-up, stripped-down '68 Plymouth Barracuda, pursuing her killer. The man he seeks in a high-speed, high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse is James Fargo, a merciless, wheelchair-bound pyschopath. Through a series of mechanical innovations, Fargo has turned his rampaging '72 Cadillac Eldorado into a monstrous extension of his own twisted body and mind. Now, their deadly battle of wits and wills is about to move into overdrive. And caught in their headlights is a tormented beauty who unwittingly holds the key to their ultimate showdown.

Taylor Brooks is a young, overachieving coed at a posh New England college whom decides to pledge the secret society The Skulls whom her father and many of the faculty are members and whom her older brother died years earlier during an initiation practice. But Taylor's willingness to break the all-male Skulls taboo of pledging as the first woman to do so put her at odds with the other pledges and alumni members. When she finally succeeds in fulfilling her membership despite inference from the Skull members, she soon finds herself in hot water when her boyfriend is found murdered, and she's accused of the crime. Taylor must find a way to prove her innocence and find the real killer despite the fact that no one around her can be trusted.

In 1998, three white men in the small town of Jasper, Texas, chained a black man to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him to his death...