Sunny never got to tell her own story. That’s how she ended up serving a six-year jail sentence for shooting her abusive husband, Earl. If she had been able to take the stand, she would have explained that Earl, the pastor of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following, was the one who forced her at gunpoint to put her arm into a crate of rattlesnakes. That’s when Sunny turned on Earl in self-defense.

Now that she has served her time, Sunny is determined never to go back to Earl and the church in Little Egypt. She inherits some money and a garage apartment from her uncle Warren. On his deathbed, Warren made the anthropologist Jackson Jones, his friend and landlord, promise to look after Sunny. But Sunny swears she’ll never rely on a man again, even as she and Jackson fall into a comfortable relationship. Sunny throws herself into her studies at the local university, specializing in herpetology, the study of snakes, which she handled for most of her life in Little Egypt.

Now in love with Sunny, Jackson is reminded of his last heartbreak: He has a daughter he’s never met in the Ituri Forest in Africa, where he did his fieldwork years ago. Eager to get on with a new research project, Jackson goes to Little Egypt to interview Earl and his congregation. As Jackson gets dangerously close to the snakes and the spirit of the church, he finds himself on the precipice of a big decision --- does his future lie in Illinois with Sunny, or should he return to Africa and finally meet the daughter he left behind?