Shattered by grief and dreaming of vengeance, Penn Cage sees his family and his world collapsing around him. The woman he loves is gone, his principles have been irrevocably compromised, and his father, Dr. Tom Cage, once a paragon of the community that Penn leads as mayor, is about to be tried for murder. Most terrifying of all, Dr. Cage seems bent on self-destruction. Despite Penn’s experience as a prosecutor in major murder trials, his father has frozen him out of the trial preparations—preferring to risk dying in prison to revealing the truth of the crime to his son.

During forty years practicing medicine, Tom Cage made himself the most respected and beloved physician in Natchez, Mississippi. But this revered Southern figure may never have been as virtuous as he seemed. Could Penn have a half-brother, the product of an 1960s affair between Tom and his devoted African American nurse, Viola Turner? This furious man has driven the murder prosecution of Dr. C