Gaus, Paul L

Ruth Zook returns home to Holmes County, Ohio, carrying a heavy suitcase and a heavier heart. Coerced into becoming a drug mule, Ruth retaliates by destroying her illicit burden and pays for it with her life. When Fannie Helmuth confesses that she was similarly coerced, Sheriff Bruce Robertson realizes that the drug dealers' operation reaches all the way to Florida's Pinecraft Amish community. He immediately moves the investigation South, where more innocent lives are in jeopardy.

Amish farmer Enos Erb asks history professor Michael Branden to investigate the death of his brother, which he believes was a murder, and the amateur sleuth finds links between the Amish case and the apparent suicide of a college student.

Professor Michael Branden of Holmes County, Ohio, suspects foul play in a fatal vehicular "accident, " leading him to search for connections between a real estate scam, the disappearance of an Amish man's estate trustee and a bank official, and a rash of robberies by Amish teenagers.

Professor Michael Branden, Pastor Caleb Troyer, and Sheriff Bruce Robertson attempt to penetrate the secrecy of the Old Order Amish of Holmes County, Ohio, in order to recover a ten-year-old boy who has been kidnapped by his outcast father.