This account of a killing in a mansion in Savannah, Georgia is set in the heart of the American South, in the early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defence? The unpredictable twists and turns of a murder case are interwoven with a first-person account of life in the Old South. Filled with a cast of Savannah's eccentrics - the black drag queen, the voodoo priestess, the society ladies who play bridge in full regalia and the hapless recluse who possesses a bottle of poison potent enough to kill the whole city.