Judge Deborah Knott has agreed to marry her childhood friend, Deputy Sheriff Dwight Bryant, but it's hardly the love match of the century. Indeed she now questions whether friendship, mutual history and good sex are really enough to make a strong marriage. Her antidote to cold feet: head for the hills. When asked to fill in for a vacationing judge in Cedar Gap Deborah readily agrees. It seems the perfect place to clear her head but she arrives in time to hear the case against a young man who's been arrested for the brutal murder of a prominent doctor. Then, with the suspicious death of a second resident, Deborah realizes that she must examine Cedar Gap through critical eyes. And what she sees will rock her with an entirely new theory about the murder case...and her impending marriage.