The First Treaty (Prequel) — Paperback

Cecile Batiste is twenty years old when the old women of the Ninth Ward arrange her marriage to Vernon Deveraux — a treaty signed in white, in a church so full the ushers stop seating people and start standing them.

She decides to be excellent. She learns the house. She falls, sideways and against the plan, into a marriage that works. And in her ninth month she finds the thing sewn into the family's books — a modest, fixed, unexplained payment, older than the business itself, riding a morning ferry to a town nobody watches.

She has been dead for thirty-two years when a ninety-one-year-old woman finally tells the whole story to a twenty-two-year-old undertaker who is about to be handed across the water herself.

THE FIRST TREATY is the prequel to ALL SAINTS — the complete ten-book dark mafia romance. A novella you read in an evening, and it changes how you read everything that comes after.

Paperback. 6 × 9 inches, cream paper, 60 pages, matte cover. For adult readers; contains depictions of grief and an off-page death. Choose Standard, or Signed by the author.

Then start the saga: Book One is The Treaty. November 1997. The second treaty. This time, somebody told the girl.