After a sixteen-year exile, Ben Scot returns to his Lake Superior home for a funeral–– His father's, the six-term US Senator from Minnesota and the sole survivor of the worst shipwreck in Lake Superior history. The sinking of the freighter, the Benjamin Goth has remained unsolved for fifty years. Some say the Senator has carried the secret to the grave.

Ben decides to remain at the side of his ailing Native American mother. To heal past wounds, he slowly connects two unrelated events to his father's past: the unsolved hit and run death of his Down syndrome sister and a plot to destroy an Indian-owned wild rice industry. He must also deal with sudden appearance of the father’s illegitimate son, a wealthy Pentecostal pastor named Saul, who offers a high-paying job to entice Ben into allowing a tent show revival to be built on the land that has fallen into his mother’s hands, a rugged Lake Superior peninsula called Resurrection Point. Amid an onslaught of radical Pentecostals and threats of eminent domain, Ben uncovers signs of a conspiracy, but is too obsessed with a vivacious snake-handler woman to heed the warnings behind a wave of deadly accidents.