Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding in the road.
Eighteen years later, Bandy's son - a stranger bearing his name - returns to the town, where the memory of his father's crime still hangs thick. When an accident brings the family - paroled father, widowed mother, injured son - back together, the three must confront their past, and struggle against their fate.
Like a traditional Greek tragedy, suffused with the mud, ice, and rock of the raw Idaho landscape, Then Came the Evening is tautly plotted and emotionally complex - a stunning debut.