"New Orleans, May 1862. The largest city in the ill-starred confederacy has fallen to Union troops under the soon-to-be-infamous General Benjamin 'the Beast' Butler ... When twelve-year-old Joseph Woolsack disappears from his home, he draws into the unrest his mother Elise, a mixed-race woman passing for white, and his father Angel, whose long and wicked life is drawing to a close. What follows forces mother and son into a dark new world: Joseph must come to grips with his father's legacy of violence and his growing sentiment for Cuban exile Marina Fandal ... Elise must struggle to maintain a hold on her sanity, her son, and her own precarious station, but is threatened by the resurgence of a troubling figure from her past" --