With Penumbra, Carolyn Haines branched out from the cozy Southern mysteries that made her name and into more serious territory. With her next literary crime novel, she moves to 1944 New Iberia, Louisiana, where Henri Bastion, a wealthy plantation owner, has been brutally eviscerated. Deputy Raymond Thibodeaux finds Adele Hebert covered in blood and hovering over the body. When Adele claims to be the loup garou, a legendary Cajun shape shifter disguised as a wolf, and panic ensues in this small town already living under the pressure of wartime poverty, Raymond is determined to prove that shes been framed.