In this coming-of-age story of love, heroism and murder, a prize-winning author returns to his Alabama childhood during the 1960's bloody Civil Rights Movement. In the vein of To Kill a Mockingbird, Kirkus Reviews calls the novel "a profound, engrossing ... heartbreakingly real novel of the South."In the August heat before young Sonny Poe starts ninth grade, he witnesses in the cool nighttime woods the beating and lynching of a black boy. He escapes, but his life is now irrevocably changed.Sonny lives out the rest of summer in terror of being found out by the town's agitated KKK. Now desperate for guidance and answers, he latches onto a progressive doctor with a crusading spirit, a man who will turn Sonny's and his own mysterious life upside down in a tension-fueled thriller of betrayal and corruption that can only end in tragedy—and hope.