"Polk Salad Annie, the gators got your granny." And more. A tale of lust and cruelty in a backwater settlement along the Trinity River.A scandalous moment of surrender to Marcus Fairweather, Earl of Sheldon and May Thorne is riddled with guilt: all despite the fact her debauched husband’s passions are sated anywhere but in the marital bed. Worse, when Squire Thorne is brutally murdered, her legacy is determined by a clause in her late husband’s will. Thus wedlock to his lawyer, a man of zealous moral and religious bent is utterly abhorrent to her. Nonetheless, the lawyer is of mind to enact the clause in haste, and his ardent advances are somewhat intense and unsettling. But who shot Squire Thorne poses a mystery – the lawyer, the earl, or a strange intruder who steals nothing? In the aftermath of death a long-held family secret is finally revealed, and when a shadowy figure looms in her moonlit bedchamber, she fears the outcome...