No one in Mississippi would have ever made the connection between the two: a young female nurse found diced up, floating in her bathtub, and a distinguished older physician who drowns after tumbling from his deer stand.

However, Darden North masterfully weaves a fabric of secret self-indulgences, reverse discrimination, diverse sexual interests and murder that drapes across his fictional southern community.

True to the custom of southern discretion, the rages of these diverse orientations are private, generally tasteful, but nevertheless a demonstration of the uninhibited.

Lurking on the periphery, indirectly touching nearly every colorful character in this first-time novel, is a demonic killer whose victims share the wounds of a twisted psyche. To parallel the bumbling, but eventually successful police investigation of the nurse’s slaughter, is the spreading poison of corporate financial greed that defiles the very core of the medical community.