Death at Sunrise relates the story of the last public hanging carried out in the United States. Rainey Bethea, a young black man of twenty-two, was convicted of raping and murdering a seventy-year-old white woman and sentenced to hang for his crime. Fiction mixes with fact as the reader follows Rainey from his beginning in Virginia to the small, rural town of Owensboro, Kentucky, in the early 1930s where his trial and hanging brought headlines from around the world.