Arfel Booker is a great young blues musician in the 1940s South. One night, after playing a blues gig in a new town, a beautiful woman takes him back to her log cabin to make love. In the morning (after blacking out from too much liquor), he awakens to an unwelcome surprise. Instead of the woman, an unfamiliar white man is in the bed, and the man's throat has been slashed with Arfel's knife.

Arfel knows he's been framed, so he makes a run for it and heads north by hopping trains. Once a safe distance from the southern town, Arfel makes the acquaintance of Lemontree Johnson, a fellow...

Arfel Booker is a great young blues musician in the 1940s South. One night, after playing a blues gig in a new town, a beautiful woman takes him back to her log cabin to make love. In the morning (after blacking out from too much liquor), he awakens to an unwelcome surprise. Instead of the woman, an unfamiliar white man is in the bed, and the man's throat has been slashed with Arfel's knife.

Arfel knows he's been framed, so he makes a run for it and heads north by hopping trains. Once a safe distance from the southern town, Arfel makes the acquaintance of Lemontree Johnson, a fellow...

Money in 1923 is an object of excess, not restraint or caution. New York City is a metropolis of big business and Wall Street and gritty finance. It's the Gilded Age and Maxwell Engelbert De Wolfe loves being immersed in it. A New York-based financier and owner of De Wolfe & Fitch, he's one of the world's wealthiest men.

The fifty-four-year-old De Wolfe is trapped in a loveless marriage to Alexandra Bauer, a marriage arranged between two wealthy German families thirty-one years ago. To satisfy his needs, he maintains Eva Durant as his mistress, hiding her in a building at 10 Ballad...

After serving fifteen years to life in Borden Prison for the murder of Bootsy Taylor in Cross City, in the fictional state of Borden, assistant principal Jericho Walls is paroled. When Bootsy Taylor was murdered, Jericho was twenty-six. Facing his demons in Borden Prison, Jericho looks forward to starting a new life. But Red Taylor, Bootsy's older brother, is determined to change all of that.

The score between them, supposedly, was settled fifteen years ago, when Red Taylor's drug gang murdered Jericho's younger brother Allan in retaliation. Red Taylor, who is serving a...

Destined to live and die in Charity Plantation, just like his beloved mother before him, Arthur's fate is altered by a tragedy. A plantation owner's son drowned in a creek on his friend's watch, and Arthur has to witness Packer pay for the unforgivable sin of letting a white man's son die. Only Arthur's attempt to save Master Joshua spared him from the same fate.

Drowned in grief and remorse, plantation owner Sebastian Colby sees the slave as his redemption, and so he sets out to own Arthur--at any cost. Suddenly, Arthur finds himself uprooted from the only home he has ever known and...