Publisher's Synopsis
This book can be read as a standalone novel.
France, 1788. The winds of change are blowing, and all can feel the air upon their skin. This is the time of the Heirlooms, the age where the two mysteries, the Cross and the Song, are created.The priceless necklace, the Cross of Nantes, lost to the Traversier family in 1759, has reappeared in their ancestral home - on the neck of the girl hit by Xavier's carriage.
Her name is Estelle Guerrier. Legally white, from Saint-Domingue, she will affect all those in her wake, awakening passion, envy, and violence.
Her brother Guillaume - a handsome, profligate rake - having lit Grenoble on fire, walks to Paris and enters the world of Boulevard theater... and Sans-Culotte revolution, a man seemingly doomed to stand in the fire of chaos.
1832 - Haiti, a tension-filled stew of French and African culture, voodoo, Creole, disease, poverty, beauty and tyranny. Decades later, the time of the detectives searching for the two mysterious Crimson Heirlooms. Jake Loring, legally blackmailed to search for the Heirlooms by the mysterious Monsieur Tyran, finds himself in a nation recovering from war and genocide, tasked with finding clues regarding the priceless artifact named The Cross of Nantes. As Jake plots to fake his death and return home to Boston, he discovers the nature of the forces arrayed against him... and new clues of the Cross, which strike too close to home.
As Jake searches for meaning decades past the events of the Heirlooms, and the characters he pursues move through their lives, the two timelines become a triangle - impossibly coming together to form meaning and shape, as if time had no power to separate them.
Indeed, Jake's search is revealed as part of the ancient mystery.
