Book excerpt: In the last twenty years preceding the war between the states, life in Southern Georgia was slow and gentle, seemingly caught up in an age of assumed innocence and preferred isolation. With only a smattering of the gentility of the South to grace its society, it would be readily evident to any visitor that Carsons Cove was not on par with one of the more metropolitan areas like Savannah or Atlanta. It might well have been considered rather basic by some standards. But neither was it such a place where one would expect to discover dark, elaborate, and deadly secrets hidden, smoldering just beneath the surface, secrets interlaced into the network and the fiber of the community so that tragedy and titillation had almost equal impact. In such a close-knit setting, the casual visitor would hardly suspect the level of hurt and the depth of deception that were part and parcel of the very fabric of day-to-day living.