When a developer buys a farm in rural Vermont, weird things start to happen in the tiny town of Comtosook: Rose petals rain from a clear sky; soil freezes in the middle of summer; coffee machines pour lemonade. Rumours circulate that the farm is haunted by ghosts from a native American burial ground of the Abenaki tribe. The developer hires ghost hunter Ross Wakeman, who got into the spectral search business to seek his dead fiancée Aimee. At the farm, Ross meets a mysterious young lady named Cecelia who wins his heart. When Ross discovers Cecilia’s gravestone, the story invokes a mystery that started 70 years earlier when Vermont was a hotbed of activity for a Eugenics project that provided a template for Hitler’s racial purity program.

Set mostly during the American Civil War, this is the story of young Irish migrant Willie Burke, the black woman he touches to read and the Northern abolitionist whom he loves. As the vortex of the Civil War sweeps away lives, livelihoods and love affairs, the tale explores the moral choices confronting Willie, Flower Jamison and Abigail Downling as the tumult tears apart the genteel culture of the Old South and exposes the brutal and brutalised underclass on whose back it was built. James Lee Burke uses major battles of the Civil War, at Shiloh, Shenandoah and Louisiana, as set pieces to punctuate his story of love, loss and liberation. It is not a history book, but an historical novel, using an epic setting to explore how Willie and his women discover their true characters in this punishing time. While the battle scenes are brutal, as is the treatment meted out to blacks in the South, the story is permeated with a surprising tenderness and confidence in the power of human kindness.