On a hot summer night in 1927, inside a slave shack on his family estate, lawyer Charles St Claire has been brutally stabbed. In the big house, a celebrated beauty, Hollywood goddess and his wife, stands covered in bruises and in his blood.
As might be found in any small town, other suspects, lawyers, the detectives investigating the case, all know each other, the dead man and the accused - and many of them have been her lover. But in New Orleans, in a time for hot jazz and riverboats, bootleg gin and juju masters, more secrets seem to lie in the swamps even than in the dark shuttered houses, and no two people seem completely unrelated.
