The strength an beauty of the American heartland shines through in the story of a ranching family struggling with the death of its patriarch and withsome overwhelming familial and cultural myths.

Swedish farmer John Bergson's daughter Alexandra encourages the family members to help keep his dream alive after his death.

Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J.B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J.B.'s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family: J.B.'s cunning and hard father, Drum; his estranged wife, Dulcinea; and his teenage sons, Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths...