Itinerant psychic performer Mario Castigliani and police chief Beaufort Tyler join forces in Floraville, Georgia, to investigate a suspicious death. An elderly black civil rights activist, supposedly committed suicide, but Tyler has his doubts – especially since Tyler's predecessor recently died the same way. Castigliani's authentic ability to read minds (Tyler never has a doubt) proves invaluable both to the plot and to the narrative, which includes frequent "unspoken" clues. The investigations drives Castigliani deeper in to the peculiar dynamics of Floravilles inhabitants and into the arms of Claudia Pennington, a ballet teacher unhappily married to a mill owner, the town’s leading citizen. References to Castigliani's Italian past in the Umbrian city of Perugia, local textile mill unrest, personal entanglements, and rich tapestry of believable characters, mainsteam and extreme eccentrics of that seem to flourish in the South deliver a gripping excursion into a small Southern mill town on the cusp of its almost feudal past and the tsunami of globalization about to overwhelm it.