In 1969, during the crux of the Vietnam war, Jack Tagger is on the run. As the war in Southeast Asia rages on, he has made the moral decision to resist the draft. In his effort to avoid the authorities and the war, he seeks refuge on a desolate coastal barrier island where unbeknownst to him, while avoiding one war, he finds himself unwittingly caught in the middle of another deadly land-war between two very powerful men at Sunset Beach, North Carolina. When a native American shaman summons the spirit of an innocent victim of that conflict, Jack is again forced to make a potentially lethal choice between good and evil and he learns that, like Madd Inlet, what runs smooth and meandering on top does not always belie what runs just beneath the surface.