Near the town of Tazewell, on the western edge of the Mississippi Delta, amidst vast fields of cotton and ponds of catfish, twenty-four-year-old Warren Pope manages the Paradise Catfish Farm. He befriends most of the locals and struggles with the Delta's lingering reluctance to cast aside the last remaining vestiges of social injustice. Pope's archnemesis, Chief Deputy Leo Abrams, doesn't appreciate the northern outsider and the two tangle in a suspenseful, action-packed sequence of events that could only happen in the backwood haunts of Mississippi.