The Yorke College football team is on the 10-yard line, with three minutes to go in the most crucial game of the season, when their coach slumps suddenly to the ground, a bullet through his heart. Even though fifty thousand spectators are witnesses to the murder, not one, including Detective Van Dusen Ormsberry, sees the shooter. Ormsberry must discover the murderer before the media pressures law enforcement to arrest an innocent man, but as Ormsberry and his friend, Bill Adams, pursue their investigations, what had seemed a simple case of homicide becomes a complex circle of mystery that threatens to engulf the little college town in terrible tragedy.