Karissa Scott is a thirty-year-old woman, flamboyant in dress and attitude toward life, but she’s in crisis. Her career in a downtown Cincinnati art gallery is going nowhere. She convinces her friend J.J., a chess prodigy and computer geek, to accompany her to New Orleans where she plans to kickstart her abandoned journalism career by investigating art thefts, thanks to an inside tip from a friendly detective. When she discovers a rococo masterpiece in a hidden room of a former slave plantation mansion, she thinks she’s on the verge of a Pulitzer. Guy Devereaux, the mansion’s owner—and the ringleader of a gang of art thieves—has other plans for her. The next two weeks of her life on the run with J.J. takes her through alligator-infested bayou to sleazy motels in the New Orleans red-light district, always a half-step ahead of Devereaux and his hired killer.