Debts of the Past

In the gracious, shadow-draped town of Meridian, philanthropist Augustus Blackwood is a living monument to rectitude—until a mundane debt lawsuit exhumes the skeletons of his wretched origins. As those who remember his squalid youth begin to die in tidy accidents, a visiting journalist discovers that Blackwood will slaughter anyone to keep his crafted identity intact. Blending true-crime elegance with Southern Gothic decay, the story asks whether a society that forgets its dead can ever call itself just.