Jesse finds himself struggling to get his job back as the Paradise police chief, and he is forced to rely on his cop intuition to sort through a maze of misleading clues and hidden meanings as he attempts to solve a shocking and horrifying mob-related double homicide.

Two separate stories mesh – in the first, a young music teacher, Maggie Andrews, begins dying of a heart condition and her son Nathan tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for her before she dies. In the second, lawyer Robert Layton and his wife Kate are slowly drifting apart and the matter comes to a head during Christmas when Kate takes over for Maggie for the school choir.