In an un-named town in Georgia, Sandra (Kate Jackson) sees her new clerical job as the fresh she needs to help support her two young children. She works as a secretary for the Wiley Lumber Company, where inappropriate behavior and corruption are blatant.

Although the company's association with the Department of Labor's Commissioner Sam Caldwell (Dean Stockwell) is less clear, it is obvious to Sandra, who decides to blow the whistle on what she sees as fraud, with the help of her romantic interest and co-worker Tommy Marchant (John Shea). But it becomes a nightmare of mayhem and murder, as she realizes Sam has built an empire on blackmail, drug-dealing, prostitution and kickbacks. After her friend is viciously reaped, Sandra faces a terrifying dilemma: become part of Sam's team or it's next victim. Unwilling to accept either choice, she decides to fight back.

The teleplay by Richard Rashke has some half-amusing southern wit. "He needs a new car the way Georgia needs another peanut farm". "You left a trail so wide a blind coon dog could follow it". "He's inside the coop. He knows where the eggs are". "They're like mean old tics. One smell of blood and they borough right on in". And "Georgia's half swamp. Sources have been known to disappear". However all the "You'll"'s and "Sugar"'s grow tiresome, and we even have the cliched exchange "Why should we trust you? You don't have much of a choice".

Director Jan Egleson uses a tilted camera, a flashlight shone into the camera, hand-held, and black & white freezes when photograph's are taken, but the twangy guitar in the music score of composer David McHugh's is over-used. It's also hard to accept a tale about the abuse of women told by a director who introduces an actress by her legs, humiliates another in a rape scene, and drools over bikini-clad babes.

Scripter Richard Rashke won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage (in the Georgia Gazette) of the actual case on which "Justice in a Small Town" is based; but lackluster pacing and an overall sense of routine in this NBC re-creation, from Hill/Fields Prods. and under Jan Egleson's direction, do not quite define the motivations of either heroes or villains.

High-level corruption in a Georgia governmental office stirs the anger of a civil service employee (Kate Jackson); she enlists a fellow worker (John Shea) in a whistle-blowing attempt, placing jobs, lives and families at risk. Under the thumb of its sleazoid boss (the ubiquitous Dean Stockwell), the Georgia Dept. of Labor is shown to be a veritable snakepit of sleaze: hiked expense accounts, kickbacks, drugs and sexual harassment. Before Jackson and Shea can get their story through to an FBI deus ex machina (Gustave Johnson), they undergo the familiar round of house-torching, car-smashing and the like.

Surely writer Rashke's award-winning reportage soared free of the baggage that clutters his vidpic retelling -- such items as that the single-mom-heroine's two children (Megan Gallagher, Rand Courtney) are bratty even by network-movies-from-hell standards.