Titus Crown is the novel’s protagonist, and the first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia. He himself grew up in Charon County and has returned to live here again during the main events of the novel. Although Titus left town for a while to attend college and join the FBI, his father’s poor health has precipitated his recently return. While this is the public reason for his return to Charon County, the narrative later reveals that he secretly shot a white supremacist named Red DeCrain after the rest of DeCrain’s family died by suicide vests. Red’s vest malfunctioned and spared his life, and according to FBI protocol, Titus should have arrested DeCrain. The FBI allowed Titus to resign quietly to avoid a scandal, and Titus returned home to help his father and run for sheriff, vowing to help fix the system from the inside. However, once Titus becomes the sheriff, he learns that it’s not so easy to fix the entire system, because violence, racism, and dangerous, perverted versions of Christianity are running amok and making the system even worse. To make matters worse, most of the villains are hiding in plain sight, and there are limits to Titus’s power, both in terms of how people treat him based on his race as well as structural limits imposed by the state police, federal government, and other authorities.