In New Orleans' French Quarter, a tarot card reader told Polly Deschamps -- runaway daughter of "trailer trash" -- that she would be a success. Thirty years later, Polly is a respected professor of literature with a safe life for herself and her two daughters. Butcher Boy, so dubbed by a horrified community in Minnesota following a 1970s murder spree, was released on his seventeenth birthday, shook the snow from his boots and headed south. New Orleans, a Mecca for runaways then and now, offers sanctuary but never forgiveness. When Polly falls in love with Marshall Marchand, a restoration architect, shadows of the past rise out of the poisoned ground of New Orleans as thick and deadly as the toxic waters of the flood. Like history, some crimes are doomed to repeat themselves. Evil stays the same, only the victims' names change. As two broken pasts collide in an uncertain present, Polly is determined that her children's names will never be on that list.