When the murder phone rings, it only means one of two things: someone has dialed the wrong number, or more likely, a homicide has occurred in Sussex County, Delaware. Prosecutors in the Delaware Department of Justice pass the on-call alert system off to each other in shifts, one phone for a senior attorney and one phone for a junior attorney. If you happen to have the phone when a grisly call comes in, you've just received your next case assignment. At first, junior prosecutor Laurence Madlyn III ("Maddy") is anxious and intrigued when the device awakens him in the early morning hours one day in July. His superior informs him that a girl named Kendra Blakesfield has been found raped and murdered in the upstairs bedroom of her rented summer house in Dewey Beach, Delaware, a town known for its wild times and endless summer parties. The case is tragic and perplexing, but just as the investigation begins to unfold, something remarkable happens. Two college-aged boys appear at the police station the day after Kendra's murder, claiming to have information about her death. One is her estranged "boyfriend;" the other is . . . a friend. Although reluctant to do so, Maddy finds himself interrogating the boys, and as the hours tick by, he begins to piece together what happened to poor Kendra the night before. But the hows and the whys are far from clear, until Maddy ultimately realizes that the more he knows, the more he himself is in very real danger.