Cecil Durgin, a twelve-year-old African-American orphan, witnesses the perverse buildup to a brutal murder at an exclusive hunting camp in 1958. Decades later, the shame and guilt are still haunting him when fissures start forming in the lives of several characters unwittingly connected by a young woman's body buried deep in the West Alabama woods. Thirty years of pressure and bitterness ignite an unstoppable chain reaction leading back to the night of the murder - and the truth. 'In a Temple of Trees' is the story of secrets and their devastating aftermath on the powerful and the meek, husbands and wives, the living and the dead.