When young Harry Crane discovers the black woman s body, mutilated and bound to a tree with barbed wire, he unwittingly unleashes a storm of uncontrolled fear, thinly buried racial animosities, and fearsomely escalating violence. Jacob Crane, Harry s father and the town constable, struggles valiantly to see that proper justice gets done. Then Harry and his younger sister, Thomasina, fix their own growing suspicions on the legendary native horror called the Goat Man, who the locals say lurks beneath the swinging bridge that crosses the Sabine. More real than they ever could have imagined, the creature holds the key to a string of brutal and confounding murders."