Penn Cage is no stranger to death. As a Houston prosecutor he sent
sixteen men to death row, and watched seven of them die. But now, in the
aftermath of his wife's death, the grief-stricken father packs up his
four-year-old daughter, Annie, and returns to his hometown in search of
healing. But peace is not what he finds there.
Natchez, Mississippi, is the jewel of the antebellum South, a city of
old money and older sins, where passion, power, and racial tensions
seethe beneath its elegant façade. After twenty years away, Penn is
stunned to find his own family trapped in a web of intrigue and danger.
Determined to save his father from a ruthless blackmailer, Penn stumbles
over a link to the town's darkest secret: the thirty-year-old unsolved
murder of a black Korean War veteran. But what drives him to act is the
revelation that this haunting mystery is inextricably bound up in his
own past. Under a blaze of national media attention, Penn reopens the
case, only to find local records destroyed, the FBI file sealed, and the
town closing ranks against him.
Penn joins forces with Caitlin Masters, a beautiful young newspaper
publisher, on a quest that will lead from the bayous of the South to the
highest reaches of the U.S. government. His need to right a terrible
wrong pits him against the FBI, the powerful judge who nearly destoyed
his family, and his most dangerous adversary: a woman he loved more than
twenty years before, and who haunts him still. His crusade for justice
will ultimately lead him into a packed Mississippi courtroom, where he
fights a battle that could end a decades-old silence and force the truth
to be spoken at last.
