"There's so much to delight a reader in local author Jack Matthews' new novel, it's hard to know where to start. Probably with the prose, which Matthews writes with easy, lyrical grace and a bulls-eye wit."—Jim Phillips, "Jack Matthews is an American original."—William Heyen presents a world of abolitionist passion, murder, and old-fashioned cussedness, a world of steamboats plying the Ohio River, and a world with people troubled by such grand irrelevancies as love. Here is a world as richly confused as our own—and as alive as living can get.