Kirjahaku

In the fall of 1865, Confederate prisoner of war Cole Terry returns to post-war Mississippi consumed with anger and hellbent on vengeance. Spurning his wartime promise to the beautiful Annabelle Gardner, he sets out to thwart Sam Caruthers, the stepfather who betrayed him and the Confederacy. Fate hands Cole the means to intercept Sam's long-sought settlement of an old Revolutionary War claim amounting to a fortune in Yankee gold. But Cole and his cohorts' theft is threatened by the fact that Sam's acquisition of the money was itself a convoluted heist conceived deep within the bowels of the Treasury Department, and Treasury wants the money back. Complicating matters, Treasury's investigation is mired in the disappearance of James Petersen, the politically connected Union officer who, working with Sam Caruthers, took Cole prisoner back in 1863.But as the Radical design against the defeated South takes shape, Cole perceives there is more at stake than personal vengeance, now overshadowed by the cause of liberty and the realization that his tossed-away Annabelle, no stranger to the war-time machinations surrounding his capture, harbors secrets of her own, and those secrets have placed her in the crosshairs of ruthless men. How much does Annie know regarding the stolen money and the missing James Petersen, and truth be told, is she friend or foe?

Following the War Between the States, brothers-in-arms Hugh King and James Gibson combined their timber assets to create a successful company linked to antebellum lumbering. But during the decade that followed, King and Gibson Lumber's direction became mired in the ambition of Hugh King's mother-in-law, Evangeline Markiston, who embraced the tempo of the New South and covertly threatened the company's meager assets with dreams of a lumber empire. A carnal romance between James Gibson's eighteen-year-old son, Jack, and Eva's sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Adel, exacerbated the strife, which ended seven years earlier with the murder of Hugh King and the execution of James Gibson for the crime. Gibson's death left Eva in charge of the company and a guilt-ridden Jack disinherited.In the intervening years, Eva has run King and Gibson Lumber into the ground, but what she lacks in business acumen, she makes up for in ruthlessness. Penny King is the only child of Hugh King and Eva's daughter Clarissa. Ten years old when her father died, Penny never harbored doubt that justice was served with the execution of "Uncle" Jimmy. Now seventeen, the deaths behind her, she has promised herself to a young medical student, who pledged his troth in return. Shortly after his graduation from medical school, however, Mark Reed elopes with Penny's sister, Adel.The double betrayal is as inexplicable as it is devastating, but Penny soon finds herself the object of interest of the heir to Biloxi's wealthiest importer, and she hastens into marriage with a seemingly agreeable young man. But Harold Noble harbors secrets that make him anything but agreeable. Additionally, her marriage comes with stipulations that could lead to boon or bust for her father's company, stipulations driven by the ambitions and perverse lusts of a family whose influence stretches from Mississippi City to Mobile, and Penny is suddenly caught between her ruthless grandmother and her twisted in-laws in a plot fraught with jealousy, greed, and murder in a de facto prison of a house harboring an unshackled evil of its own.Defeated and alone, Penny turns to an unlikely ally, the enemy of her enemy, a man with reasons of his own to untangle the twisted mystery threatening to crush Hugh King's daughter.