When the Southern Tier Strangler, a serial killer taking victims across the Rust Belt, winds up dead on Bina Morton's autoliner, she finds herself caught in a murder mystery in reverse: This murderer is an estranged man from her rural New York hometown and the mother that abandoned her might have been one of his early victims. The events that follow force Bina to confront buried memories of home, the woman her mother truly was, and everything Bina herself left behind.