Dangerous Secret

In 1922, a time when Jim Crow and its offshoot, the One-Drop Law, are at their height, a dangerous secret from the past rises like a cottonmouth to strike in the present. In Lake Badin, Louisiana, Odette Montagne Grandpierre discovers just how dangerous the secret is. Threatened with blackmail for her "one drop" of black blood, faced with losing her lifelong identity, being stigmatized as a member of a disdained race and stripped of her civil rights, she decides her only way out is to murder her tormentor. But she can't follow through with it. When her niece by marriage, Giselle O'Connell Richards, discovers the blackmail and the jeopardy in which it places Odette, she takes up the cudgels in Odette's defense. Using her weekly newspaper column Giselle tries to fight fire with fire--never dreaming that she, herself, will be caught in the firestorm she creates.