Nothing much happens in Garrison, a small township in Maine founded some two hundred sixty years ago - until the body of a young woman is found in a local tavern at half past midnight. She was a graduate student interning over the summer with the Town Council. Detective Ira Sills has little to go on - the forensic evidence leads nowhere - but the fact that the dead girl's laptop is missing while her purse and cell phone were not taken suggests that her death had something to do with the project she was working on: a proposal to create a sewer district as a quasi-municipal corporation. With no other leads to pursue his suspicions focus on the Chairman of the Town Council, who bears the name of the town's founder.