Theo Vos comes from Ohio to Mott County, N.C. in search of answers about an ancestor whose casket had been shipped home during the Civil War but when it arrived, the body inside wasn't his. While there, Vos is hired to tutor an agoraphobic but sexually-curious teenage girl, the only child of Milo and Calla Drew.
Milo, a once renowned author, has holed himself up in the family castle too, working on a book based on the journal of Mott County's sheriff during the 1860s.
Finding Plymm weaves back and forth between Theo's developing relationships in the community and Milo's typewritten imagination.
Only the reader knows for sure, but the answer to Theo's mystery may just be under his nose.