Jim Ackland, who suffers from a head injury sustained in a bus crash, is the chief suspect in a murder hunt, when a girl that he has just met is found dead on the local common, and he has no alibi for the time she was killed.
A struggling writer finds herself at the center of the story she is covering when brutally attacked by a notorious cult leader and mass murderer, a man who exerts an inexplicable control over his followers.
Upper-middle class teen brothers and their newly-met stepsister take a road trip to the Mexico-U.S. border in a tense revenge journey to track down the man responsible for the accident that caused their father's death.