Twenty-six-year-old newspaper reporter Vance Wade is trapped between day and night. He goes to work each afternoon at 3, and as night falls, systematically visits the most disturbing happenings in Greenville, South Carolina: robberies, overdoses, killings - usually in impoverished, dangerous urban neighborhoods. Today, an attacker has stabbed a TV reporter - Vance's night-shift rival - in his suburban apartment, and Vance quickly gets a tip that Jim McDavid was working on a story that could have brought down the city police chief. To uncover what happened, Vance must vanish into Greenville's darkest corners, get that story himself - and publish it before the chief's men get to him.