Roman Carruthers, an Atlanta financial adviser who manages money for wealthy clients, is summoned back to Jefferson Run, Virginia, after his father is left comatose in a car crash. He finds his sister Neveah exhausted from running the family crematorium alone, and his younger brother Dante addicted and deeply in debt to the Black Baron Boys, the gang whose leaders engineered the crash as a warning. Roman offers the gang his financial skills — laundering and growing their money — as the price of his family's safety, a bargain that draws him steadily into violence he believed his education and success had put behind him. As Roman schemes to free his family, Neveah reopens the question that has shadowed them for nineteen years: the disappearance of their mother, which the town has always suspected their father caused.
Author: S. A. Cosby · Original publisher: Flatiron Books: Pine & Cedar (New York), 2025
