In the wake of a career-ending scandal, disgraced lawyer Lawson Russell moves to Key West, where he befriends aging novelist Christopher Marlowe. After letting Russell borrow his latest manuscript, Marlowe dies of a heart attack. When Russell publishes the dead man's manuscript under his own name, he makes the best-seller list—and unwittingly becomes the prime suspect in the investigation of a grisly multiple homicide.
While investigating his own blackmailing, a young politician uncovers his family's deep secrets.
After leaving her husband, Ellen Foster meets a mysterious journalist in New Orleans with whom she quickly begins a passionate affair. In the midst of Mardi Gras celebrations, the relationship begins to unravel as Ellen realizes that things are not as they seem and learns that her life is in danger.
The adventures and misadventures of Tom and Huck on the Mississippi River in Missouri with their involvement when they fall in with a gang of con artists, take up with a ragtag circus, help a freed slave buy his sister's freedom, and then see a dastardly villain get her.
Ex-slave and former Union soldier Gideon Jackson represents other ex-slaves at the constitutional convention, and is soon elected to the U.S. Senate despite opposition from white landowners, law enforcement and the KKK. He unites with sharecropper Abner Lait, who helps Jackson unite ex-slaves and white tenant farmers.