Virgil Tibbs, a police officer from Pasadena, passes through Wells—a small town in North Carolina. At the small railway station where Tibbs is waiting for a train, a local policeman, Sam Wood, accidentally bumps into him and immediately arrests him—purely because of his skin color: Virgil is Black. Fighting bias against Black people—even against such an educated man as Tibbs—forms the first two chapters of the book.
Despite all obstacles, Tibbs reluctantly agrees to help investigate a murder for the local police department under Sheriff Bill Gillspe. The Pasadena officer refutes the sheriff’s theories about the identity of the criminal one by one—and, in the end, with the approval of the local law enforcers, Gillspe and Wood, he becomes the head of the investigation into a complicated murder case in Carolina.