Abstract
A spellbinding American Southern Gothic thriller with a supernatural twist—a past secret has the power to destroy the future . . . When Lucy Cartaret dies, her journalist son Dan returns to her hometown, Fort Jude, Florida, in search of his real father, claiming he's here to investigate the mysterious deaths of three elderly women. Spontaneous human combustion, experts say. But why? Surely it's more than coincidence—and what links these deaths to Dan's mother? It soon becomes clear that something terrible happened during his mother's last year in town, thirty years before. But the social elite of Fort Jude are tight-lipped. The families who run the town will do anything to protect their own—anything.