Escaping her West Virginia coalfield upbringing by following John, her fast-talking, gambler lover to New Orleans, beautiful Elizabeth discovers the decadent world in 1912 New Orleans. With her lover John's death she is destitute and alone, choosing to avoided the horrific sweatshops she selects instead one of the few ways an independent woman of those times could survive, joining the ladies of the evening in the legendary Basin Street Storyville district, a demi-world of gamblers, booze, jazz musicians, unrestricted drugs, and legalized prostitution. In the pre-WWI South Storyville is the only place the adventurous sporting man can also venture over the color line. Elizabeth's escape from this world will depend upon her evading John's murderers, who desire adding her to their list of victims, and accepting the help of a naive man from the Carolina mountains who thinks he is in love with the Storyville working girl. The book transitions from the closing of Storyville to modern times, where the Bourbon Street of today still carries vestiges of the legendary Basin Street and Storyville, a world where paranormal tentacles of the past can extend through time into the present.