Small-town waitress Ainsley Dupree is all too eager for love, and gives herself entirely and almost immediately when she meets her newly-released from jail pen-pal, Jack Stillings, for the first time. After they marry, she finds that Jack's idea of holy matrimony, a dangerous concoction born of his violent crime and subsequent religious conversion in jail, is a far more disturbing form of incarceration. The terrible tragedy which ensues pulls in local teenager Tom, already traumatized by his mother's suicide, and the stalwart Sheriff Rogers.