When an old gravesite exposes a coffin filled with rocks instead of the expected remains, and a retired state politician turns up dead, Joe Gunther and his team follow the evidence to an escaped mental patient who holds the key to solving both cases.
Joe Gunther and his team the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) are usually called in on major cases by local Vermont enforcement whenever they need expertise and back up. But after the state is devastated by Hurricane Irene, the police from one end of the state are taxed to their limits, leaving Joe Gunther involved in an odd, seemingly unrelated series of cases. In the wake of the hurricane, a seventeen year old gravesite is exposed, revealing a coffin that had been filled with rocks instead of the expected remains. At the same time, an old, retired state politician turns up dead at his high end nursing home, in circumstances that leave investigators unsure that he wasnt murdered. And a patient who calls herself The Governor has walked away from a state mental facility during the post hurricane flood. It turns out that she was indeed once Governor for a Day, over forty years ago, but that she might have also been falsely committed and drugged to keep her from revealing something that she saw all those years ago. Amidst the turmoil and the disaster relief, its up to Joe Gunther and his team to learn what really happened with the two corpses one missing and what secret The Governor might have still locked in her brain that links them all.