In this heart-racing thriller, a series of gruesome deaths ignite feuds that burn a path from the cotton fields to the courthouse steps, from the moss-draped bayous of Cajun country to the bordellos of 19th century New Orleans, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights era and across the Jim Crow decades to the Freedom Marches of the 1960s.

At the heart of the story is the apparent suicide of elderly Civil War Col. Augustine Chastaine who, two decades after the end of the Civil War, viciously slit the throat of his wife and then shot himself. Sheriff Raifer Jackson, however, believes that this may be a double homicide, and suspicion falls upon Jake Gold, an itinerant peddler with many secrets to conceal, not the least of which is that he is a Jewish immigrant in the post-Reconstruction South, where racial, religious and ethnic prejudice abounds.

Jake must stay one step ahead of the law, as well as the racist Knights of the White Camellia, as he interacts with blacks and whites, former slaves, Cajuns, crusty white field hands, and free men of color as he tries to keep one final promise before more lives are lost and he loses the opportunity to clear his name.