The King of Babylon shall not come against you

In the first week of April 1968, the central Florida town of Paradise Springs is stunned by two murders, a suicide, a kidnapping, and arson. That same week the nation is shocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis and the riots that follow in more than a hundred American towns. Twenty-five years later, a slightly battered investigative reporter named Bill Tone goes to Paradise Springs to reconstruct these violent mysteries and to make some sense of them in the context of those mad times. In the course of his research Tone discovers that past and present reverberate, obscured and illuminated by unexpected sources. Indeed, one of the most unexpected - she was only four years old in 1968 - is the town librarian, but Tone is also drawn into a maze of other stories from witnesses, participants, and even the departed. An ex-sheriff, a one-time nude model, a very successful African-American lawyer, a midget revivalist, his 300-pound common-law wife, and a retired professor turned pornographer are among the voices that sing Tone onto the rocks and into the whirlpools of the past.