A true-crime writer returns home to solve the mystery that haunted his boyhoodAfter witnessing an execution, true-crime writer Colin Douglas starts having nightmares of himself as a boy, alone by the levee, trapped in the mud of the Mississippi River. Each night, the dreams grow worse, becoming horrid recreations of the day his childhood died.In 1959, Colin and three friends went camping on the levee, across from the tumbledown old Windsong plantation. When o...

Digging for ancient Native American artifacts, an archaeologist finds murder insteadLouisiana's past is as layered as an onion, with American, French, and Spanish history all resting atop the myriad tribes who have spent millennia on the Mississippi. Alan Graham knows how to peel back the layers. A contract archaeologist in Baton Rouge, he scrapes out a living one dig at a time. Hired by a wealthy landowner to search his property for a cache of long-lost Tunica Indi...

When a young boy is implicated in a murder, Brady goes hunting for the real killerIn Pete Brady's new hometown, hunting is a religion, and he is expected to convert if he's to run the local newspaper. When Sheriff Garitty takes his son out for his first hunt, he invites Pete to join them in the deer stand—a drafty, miserable place that would be unbearable if young Scotty weren't so excited. Pete is staring down his rifle barrel, trying to decide if he has the nerve ...

An old convict returns to Troy and sends Brady's newsroom into chaosAs he was driven to Angola, Cory Wilde prayed his torment was just a dream. But the murder was real, and so was his sentence: twenty-nine years working the sugar cane fields in one of the nation's cruelest prisons. When he is finally released, he is an old man, drained of every drop of life that once made him such a terror, but his name still has the power to make the people sweat in Troy, Louisiana...

In a decaying plantation graveyard, Alan Graham finds a clue to a great American mysteryThe headstone reads Louis, and when Pepper Courtney finds it, she assumes it belonged to a slave. But when the old woman who owns the crumbling plantation house gives her an ancestor's diary, Courtney discovers that Louis was a white man whose drifter's appearance concealed a gentleman's manners. Who was this stranger, and why did he die with the president's name on his ...

His career in shambles, a newspaperman looks for a new start in rural LouisianaPete Brady is in a bar on Magazine Street, halfway through his third Manhattan, when he gets a message from the New Orleans underworld. In response to Pete's recent investigation into drug trafficking, they have sent him a message: slitting his favorite source's throat, ear to ear. Even a Pulitzer Prize can't get that image out of Pete's head, and so he bolts, moving to desolate Troy, Lou...

Micah Dunn investigates a murderous plot to discredit an archaeologistIn steamy downtown New Orleans, Gregory Thorpe is presenting an exhibition that could rewrite the history of the ancient Mayans. But when fake artifacts begin appearing alongside the authentic ones, Thorpe's reputation is thrown into jeopardy. To trace the fraud, Thorpe hires Micah Dunn, a world-weary private detective whose tour in Vietnam cost him the use of one of his arms and provided fodder f...

In the Yucatán, Alan Graham discovers either the greatest find of the twentieth century—or the greatest hoaxSearching the Gulf of Mexico for the legendary Isle of Gold, an explorer and his crew sail into a cyclone, which tears apart their ship, nail by nail. When he comes to, the captain is alone, captured by natives and facing unfathomable forms of torture.Centuries later, archaeologist Alan Graham experiences a torment of his own in the Yucatán when his be...

His mentor dead, an archaeologist returns to the mysterious YucatánA novice archaeologist, Clay Holliman came to the Yucatán Peninsula in search of the secrets of the Maya. Taken in by the family of Doctor Leon, an expert on the local excavations, Clay discovered a world where the mysteries were not fully buried—where even the city was a jungle. Ten years later, his career is in a tailspin, Doctor Leon is dead, and the Yucatán is calling him home.Although he ...

Hunting Mexican guerillas, a CIA agent fights to regain his memory and stay aliveDavid doesn't remember the bomb going off. In fact, he doesn't remember anything at all. He was on a mission in Buenos Aires when the explosion sent a piece of shrapnel into his skull, and it missed killing him by a fraction of an inch. His memory in tatters, he returns to the United States to heal, meeting his wife for what seems like the first time. His memory will return gradually, t...

Digging near a mental hospital, Alan Graham and his team come under attackA dying town just a few miles from the Mississippi River, Jackson has a psychiatric hospital, a sprawling forest, and a bloody history. In the summer of 1963, a drifter passed through town in search of work. Not finding any, he returned to New Orleans and then moved on to Dallas, where he assassinated a president. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald, and his ghost is said to haunt the woods of Jack...

On the banks of the Mississippi, Alan Graham confronts death in a watery graveIn 1833, Jim Bowie is recovering from an attack of malaria when he learns his wife and parents have been killed by cholera. Desperate for death, he hauls himself onto his horse and rides aimlessly, finally bedding down along the Mississippi. There he sees a shooting star that calls him home to Texas—and to a bloody destiny at the Alamo. One hundred fifty years later, that same star will ca...