now in her first novel repercussions are felt for decades in a dozen lives after a racist beating turns to coldblooded murder in a small 1950s mississippi townchicagoborn amrstrong tood is fifteen black and unused to the ways of the segregated deep south when his mother sends him to spend the summer with relatives in rural mississippi for speaking a few innocuous words in french to a white woman armstrong is killed and the precariously balanced world and its determined peoplewhite and blackare changed then and forever by the horror of poverty the legacy of justice and the singular gift of loves power to heal