A young woman in the late 1930s became the mother of an illegitimate child. She was living in a small, pious town, which was very judgemental. The conception of her child was by an infamous rapist. Interpol had been chasing him across three continents. There had been hundreds of rapes. His crimes made headlines around the world, and he was soon captured, sentenced to death, and electrocuted. Only the girl, her mother, and the authorities were aware of who impregnated her. When the boy was three, she and her mother decided she must become anonymous for fear that Roddy may find out that the blood of this monster runs through his veins. Changing her name, she and Roddy leave the past behind and end up in California. Roddy, now ten, ends up working in an out-of-the-way truck stop in Grapevine Village. Many adventures and complexities lay before them. Love, death, a boy's fantasies, the FBI. and warring trucking companies transporting Mexican farm workers without proper papers, who are fighting over who controls the rights to use the highway called "The Devil's Grapevine." Roddy and his mother are caught between the FBI and the warring truckers, which ends in a gunfight that ends up burning much of the village to cinders. All works out in the end with the mother, the son, and a truck driver who rescues them from the gunfire and flames.
