Beck Hardin, a high-profile Chicago trial lawyer, loses his wife to breast cancer and is left alone to raise their two young children. But he's been a full-time lawyer and a part-time father, so their lives soon fall apart. To save his children, he returns to his small hometown in the Texas Hill Country, hoping for a simpler life. He reunites with his estranged father and is quickly drafted into serving as the local judge. He finds himself trying to pay off an old debt by solving the cold case murder of his high school buddy's teenage daughter—and he discovers that a small-town judge's life isn't such a simple life.