A novel of female power and vulnerability, race, and class explores the unlikely friendship between a precocious black girl and a mysterious white woman in a small Mississippi town in the early 1980s.

A deep river pit in Natchez, Mississippi, reputed to be the hiding spot for Jean Lafitte's hidden treasure and a dumping ground for numerous murder victims, becomes the site of a dangerous showdown for Penn Cage.

After the murder of a white man in Jim Crow Mississippi, two Black sisters run away to different parts of the country...But can they escape the secrets they left behind? Two sisters on the run--one from the law, the other from social shame. What they don't realize is that there's a man hot on their trails. This man has his own brand of dark secrets and a disturbing motive for finding the sisters that is unknown to everyone but him. --Adapted from...