Sarah Booth Delaney is no shrinking violet. After all, the intrepid P.I. has been known to single-handedly save her family's Mississippi plantation from developers, calmly converse with Dahlia House's eccentric ghost, and even capture a killer or two. But when a local girl is found dead in a cotton field, it's enough to make a lady toss back a Bloody Mary before noon on Sunday.

Someone hated twenty-three-year-old Quentin McGee enough to hold her face down in the rich soil until she suffocated. The lawmen of Sunflower County think Quentin's lover killed her--a shocking ending to their scandalous romance. When the suspect's brother hires Sarah to prove his sibling innocent, Sarah quickly learns that the victim's recently published exposé of her hometown had given the girl plenty of enemies. Rich, powerful, proud enemies.

Adding spice to the gumbo is the news that Quentin was due to inherit the family fortune the day after she was killed...and that a second book was in the works. As her client's interest in her grows beyond the professional to the kinky, Sarah begins to yearn for simpler days and the affections of Sheriff Coleman Peters, who's out of town trying to save his marriage.

The gossips are having a field day: illicit lovers, outraged families, fortunes hanging in the balance, slandered aristocrats. Everyone's a suspect and no one is safe. For threatening notes have begun to arrive, notes just like the ones Quentin once received. And Sarah can feel in her bones that the killer isn't quite finished...