African-American, 38, a crime historian, Lizzie Stuart has spent most of her life in Drucilla, Kentucky. When her grandmother dies, Lizzie decides it is time for a vacation. She joins her best friend, Tess, a travel writer, for a week in Cornwall, England, in the resort town of St. Regis. Lizzie finds her vacation anything but restful when she becomes an eyewitness to murder and the probable next victim.

Crime historian Lizzie Stuart goes to Gallagher, Virginia for a year as a visiting professor at Piedmont State University. She is there to do research for a book about the 1921 lynching that her grandmother Hester Rose witnessed when she was a 12 year old child. Lizzie's research is complicated by her own unresolved feelings about her secretive grandmother and by the disturbing presence of John Quinn, the police officer she met while on vacation in England. Add to that the murder of an arrogant and brilliant faculty member on Halloween night and Lizzie has about all she can handle.

If you think life in a small Southern town is boring, then you've never been to Gallagher, Virginia. While a bitter battle for the heart of downtown Gallagher is brewing between an out-of-town multimillionaire real estate developer and a local entrepreneur, it's discovered that a local artist is missing. At the same time a story of a 50-year-old murder resurfaces and someone wants to make sure the truth about the case is buried forever.

In this compelling mystery, African American university professor and crime historian Lizzie Stuart comes face-to-face with her long lost mother, Becca. Following threads from her earlier cases, Lizzie uses her keen investigative abilities to research her own family's past and uncovers a web of murder and mayhem centered around her mother. As the pursuit of Becca runs from the gangster-led Chicago of the 1960s to modern, pre-Katrina New Orleans, Lizzie rattles the wrong people, jeopardizng her interracial relationship with homicide detective John Quinn while putting her own life in danger. Ultimately, Lizzie learns that some things are better left buried in the past.

Fitting in, being liked by his friends, or staying alive? Sometimes the person you love isn't the person you thought you knew. Crime historian Lizzie Stuart and her fiancé, John Quinn travel to a farm on the Eastern Shore of Virginia for a weekend gathering of his old West Point buddies. Mexican migrant laborers and struggling black farmers. Money, politics, and war. Too many secrets in the past, too many lies in the present, and a weekend that turns deadly.