In his haunting second novel (after The Grace That Keeps This World
), Bailey presents a vicious history of race relations in his home state. Set in fictionalized Hushpuckashaw County, Miss., in 1944, the novel opens just after the lynching death of Letitia Johnson, a black nanny accused of drowning her young charge. Letitia's 12-year-old daughter, Sally Johnson, becomes a ward of the state, and her case file lands on social worker Baby Allen's desk. Baby takes in Sally, and while hiding the girl from the Klan, she finds an unlikely ally in Jake Lemaster, the one-time college football hero who is now second-in-command to his father, Boss Chief, at Parchman Farm, the state's infamous penitentiary where Sally's father is serving time for stabbing a man during a gambling dispute. Jake's progressive politics and clashes with his father over prison reform, compounded by Jake's and Baby's quest to discover who is really responsible for the drowning, come to a violent head during one brutally hot July week. With its heels set firmly in the Southern gothic tradition (scenes involving torture, necrophilia and grisly deaths), the novel depicts a sun-scorched landscape where prospects for justice are as wilted as the cotton plants that stud the dusty ground. (Oct.)
