High school urban anthropology teacher Marius Greco is doing a doctoral dissertation on the decline of the American smalltown. He is a Los Angeleno, an Army combat veteran, a student of American cinema, and a guy with the secret. Actually two secrets, Secret she would prefer to remain so in a gossipy, conservative small town in upstate New York where he intends to employee participant-observer methodology for his doctorate. All is going well until an angry Muslim student from an Iraqi family commits a mass murder at his school, an incident that thrusts Marius into the role of a hero and it exposes one of his secrets. But it is his other secret that instigates is authorship of a daring plot to save the life of the girl he loves.