BEAUTY IN THE BLOOD

A family curse steeped in the trauma of slavery and the Civil War continues to visit carnage on unsuspecting victims into the 21st century.

1865: Five formerly enslaved men and boys run from a Georgia plantation; though the Civil War ended with a Union victory, they know that the South is still a dangerous, potentially fatal place for them, so they travel by night. 2000: A man meets a beautiful woman in a New York City bar. They have sex and, hours later, his body lies broken 18 stories beneath his hotel window. In her nearby apartment, the woman, Sarah Toomey, finds herself confused, with little memory of the day. Meanwhile, former Rikers Island corrections officer Yvonne Howard is now a pastry chef in Greenwich Village. Bitty Willets, “a frequent guest at Rikers,” shows up at her restaurant one night, begging for help in uncovering what happened to her brother, Crawford—who’d recently died by jumping, or falling, out a hotel window. Yvonne can’t get the request out of her head, so she teams up with Kenneth “Kofi” Collins—a writer she meets through a class he’s teaching at the local library—and his nephew, Bean, but she can’t prevent Bitty’s grisly death in a restaurant bathroom. When the friends uncover a haunting (and maybe haunted?) handmade quilt, they begin to wonder if the murders of two members of this family might not be supernatural in origin. As they investigate, the mysterious Sarah, desired by everyone who meets her, floats in and out of the narrative, falling into a passionate affair with a co-worker that loosens all her inhibitions. This may not be a good thing, because Sarah’s psyche—and her body—may not be completely her own. Carter cuts back and forth from the 21st century to the post–Civil War South and also drops in on 1969, 1987, and a few other years, exploring generations of two families who seem to be both targets and perpetrators of horrific violence and murder.

A genre-defying, spooky, and original take on our country’s deep racial trauma.