Half the Terrible Things is an intimate, and sometimes violent, novel portraying three interconnected lives. Based on true events, the life of Martin Tabert is short and tragic. Martin Tabert is a young farm boy from Munich, North Dakota. While traveling around the country in 1922, he is pulled off a train near Tallahassee, Florida, charged with vagrancy, sentenced to a convict work camp, and whipped to death by the camp "Whipping Boss." His body is buried in an unknown location in wild swamp country. Eighty years later, his girlfriend Edna, ailing in a nursing home in Devils Lakes, North Dakota, asks her granddaughter Nicole to find his grave. Nicole is a young attorney with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C. She searches the Florida swamps while struggling with her own guilt stemming from her work at the Justice Department post 9/11. A young Arab man, wrongly suspected of being a terrorist, has died a brutal death while in U.S. custody and Nicole has been implicated.