Mauled

The dreary winter life of a small Washington coastal town is enlivened when a victim is found with a nine-pound splitting maul protruding from his head. The only prints on the handle being his, the DA is quick to pick a slow local youth as the perpetrator. Tom Hill, a freelancer, is asked by the local paper to cover the story. He and friend Sherry Thompkins, the boy's attorney, decide there is more to the story. The suspect hides in the woods as men in four-wheel drive vehicles, armed with rifles, beat the bushes trying to find him-- preferably dead. Police warn them repeatedly and several times help to save them from attacks by these rednecks, who attempt to run them off the road into a lake, which leaves one redneck drowned. Finding allies in strange places helps put it all together, but not before they stare down the barrel of a gun.