Jade Dupree is a beautician and undertaker+s assistant, and her work with the dead is not the only thing that sets her apart from the rest of Drexel, Mississippi. Jade was raised by a black family but everyone in town knows that her real parents are a well-to-do white woman and a black man who had an affair in New Orleans. In the 1950s, that fact makes Jade both more free and more isolated.When Jade+s white half sister, Marlena, is severely beaten and her young daughter kidnapped, Jade is determined to find her niece before it+s too late. She gets some help from a white deputy sheriff, but their relationship-forbidden but inevitable-threatens to add to the violence that seems to be brewing in town.Carolyn Haines has written several acclaimed mysteries, but here she mines much darker, more serious territory, resulting in a suspenseful, lyrical, passionate and literary crime novel.