A prize-winning author returns to his Alabama childhood in this “profound, engrossing … and heartbreakingly real novel” [Kirkus Reviews] of the bloody South in 1958, a coming-of-age story of love, heroism and murder in the vein of To Kill a Mockingbird. Sonny Poe worries he’ll start ninth grade without a girlfriend when in the midnight woods he witnesses the most violent of racial horrors, the gruesome lynching of a black boy. Terrified, he runs, is chased, finds safety high in an oak. But his life is now irrevocably changed. Traumatized, Sonny lives out his summer in terror of being found by the town’s KKK. Now desperate for guidance and answers, he latches onto a progressive doctor with a crusading spirit, a man who will turn Sonny’s and his own mysterious life upside down in a tension-fueled thriller of betrayal and corruption that can only end in tragedy—and hope.