Catherine Marleau has solved a murder in a French château, saved innocent women from the witch trials of Alsace, and confronted the limits of justice on a Caribbean plantation. She thought she understood how the ring worked.
New Orleans, 1840, teaches her something new.
When a prosperous free man of color is found beaten to death in his own warehouse, the city already has its story ready: an enslaved man named César did it. Catherine knows better within hours - but proving it means untangling a web that reaches from a corrupt judge's private debts to the highest Creole family in the Vieux Carré, and finding allies in the last place anyone would expect her to look.
A café owner who hears everything. A voodoo priestess who knows what the walls won't say. A young man forced to choose between his father and the woman he loves. One by one, Catherine builds a case that could bring down one of the city's most powerful families - if the truth can survive long enough to reach anyone willing to act on it.
New Orleans has its own rules about who gets justice and who doesn't. Catherine is about to find out exactly how far the cracks in those rules go - and what it costs the people who dare to widen them.
The fourth volume in the series following forensic criminologist Catherine Marleau across the centuries, uncovering the murders history tried hardest to erase.