Killing a bird with his slingshot as a boy, William Bellman grows up a wealthy family man unaware of how his act of childhood cruelty will have terrible consequences until a wrenching tragedy compels him to enter into a macabre bargain with a stranger in black -- $c Source other than Library of Congress.

After the sudden death of her mother, haunted by unanswered questions and her own uncertain future, Kate Drayton flees New England to Charleston, South Carolina, the place where her parents met, convinced it holds the key to understanding her fractured family and saving her career in academics. Kate is determined to unearth groundbreaking information on a failed 1822 slave revolt, the subject of her mother's own research. Nearly two centuries earlier,...