Allie Ray

Suffering Fools Allie Ray

When five thousand dollars and the governor's daughter disappear from the Monmouth Plantation in 1852, Natchez Sheriff Murphy is called on to interrogate three suspicious house guests: Kitty, a minstrel actress from New York's grim Five Points district, learned the value of playing dumb and sitting pretty long ago. For Sheriff Murphy, she's all batted eyelashes and girlish innocence-But her employer, Lord Farkas, hints at a sinister cleverness lurking behind Kitty's charm. A genteel nobleman from Hungary, Farkas may be the most respectable of the suspects, but the vast incongruities between his testimony and Kitty's force the sheriff to confront the third member of their party: a free black Londoner named Coop. While Coop might have been naive about posing as a slave on this downstream venture, he's been in America long enough to know his word counts for nothing. It isn't even legal for a black person to testify against a white in Natchez. But Sheriff Murphy isn't fussing with legalities-not when a young girl is in danger. If Coop is willing to cooperate, Murphy might just be willing to make a deal. Now Coop's fate hinges on convincing Murphy of a truth more tangled than Farkas and Kitty's lies