Altar of Ashes opens with two young hunters witnessing a horror in the backwoods of Indiana: the sacrificial rite of sati, with the bride on the funeral pyre a ten-year-old girl atop the corpse of her husband.
Allen Southworth, the local prosecutor, soon finds himself embroiled in a spectacular case revolving around issues of religious toleration, cultural bigotry, and multicultural diversity, which sweep the small community into a vortex of national publicity and communal conflict. His marriage already under strain from his own mid-life crisis, Southworth is drawn toward the beautiful Asian-American co-counsel he has sought-out for assistance on the case. His opponent in the courtroom turns out to be his former law-firm counsel, Madison Fulbright, an African-American giant of brilliant legal repute. Ultimately, the case is subsumed along with its principals in the larger zeitgeist of American political conflict and cultural confrontation, impelled toward its unsuspected, astonishing resolution.