Grissom's The Kitchen House, a surprise New York Times best seller, featured an orphaned Irish immigrant caught between her masters at an antebellum Virginia plantation and the slaves to whose community she can never belong. This stand-alone follow-up features the master of the plantation, Jamie Pyke, also the son of a slave, who has fled to Philadelphia and is passing as a wealthy white silversmith. When he takes a risky trip down South to rescue a servant kidnapped into slavery, he loses his home, business, and upper-crust lover and courts death in the Great Dismal Swamp. With a national tour.

In 1830 Philadelphia, artist Jamie Pyke passes as white, even though he is an escaped slave, the product of the plantation master's brutal rape of his mother. When a young black man has taken on as a servant is kidnapped and sold into slavery, Jamie returns to North Carolina to find and free him. Soon, slave hunters are seeking him as well as the boy. In this powerful narrative, Grissom relates harrowing truths about the slave experience by telling a gripping tale filled with vivid characters. The most memorable and admirable of them all is Sukey, a house slave who lost her tongue—her master cut it out—because she cried out when her husband and children were sold and taken away from her. And then there is Jamie, who for years has lived a lie concealing a part of himself—his blackness—that he loathes. VERDICT Grissom (The Kitchen House) is a superior storyteller who remarks notably on the consequences of an institution that made beasts of some while making liars of others. [See Prepub Alert, 10/12/15.]