October 1962, and a young newspaper reporter, Hilliard Cooper, returns to his racially tense home town of Allston, South Carolina to find out who set off the midnight explosion that killed his childhood best friend, Charlotte Ravenel. By the time he learns the truth, three other people have been killed, and he might be next. Decades later, as South Carolinians argue about the Confederate flag that still defiantly flies at the state Capitol, Hill Cooper remembers that October and realizes that "Charlotte was another tragic victim of our tragic history, an innocent and unintended casualty of a war that officially ended almost a century earlier. And now, forty years later, I am the only living person who knows who killed her." Until now.... Dixie Autumn is an important addition to the literature of the American South -- a gripping, genre-stretching mystery within a powerful, philosophically and historically profound novel. It examines the paradoxical nature of good and evil, the ethical ambiguities of law and journalism, the life-affirming but potentially degrading power of human sexuality, the dangerous synthesis of hate and fear. It is also an unblinking but compassionate examination of the burden of Southern history that confounded the South and the nation in the middle years of the 20th century and continues to confound well into the 21st.