Sparrowbush

Mildred Harned is a young widow living with her three small daughters in the upstate New York town of Sparrowbush. The threadbare old community is also home to a forbidding maximum security prison named for the surrounding village. When a vacationing Manhattan trial lawyer stops at the widow Harned's remote Texaco station for gas-and a sandwich, he soon comes to suspect that Mildred's prison guard husband has been murdered by the local Correctional Officers' union because of his liberal views, and Mildred herself might be at risk. Furthermore, attorney Jack Stetson has taken a shine to the attractive activist. He'd like to know her better, and he figures it can't do any harm to linger a day or two in the dreary little village. But Jack's layover in quaintly named Sparrowbush soon becomes a nightmare