Widower Penn Cage returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, where, finding that his father is being blackmailed, he reopens a notorious murder case that involves powerfully dangerous town forces, the FBI, and his own past.

n the summer of 1962 young Dan Geary, a history professor from Chicago, embarks on a journey to reconstruct the life and mysterious death of a legendary blues artist, Virgil Thomas. His odyssey takes him from Chicago to Kansas City to St. Louis to Memphis to Helena, Arkansas, and then into the Mississippi Delta. In the South, he runs into the reality of the raging civil rights conflict. Sucked into that violent struggle, he will have to confront his...