The Foxes of Harrow

In 1825, Stephen Fox is thrown off a Mississippi riverboat with nothing but his wits. A gifted gambler and relentless climber, he cheats and charms his way into New Orleans planter society, wins a fortune at cards, and raises the great plantation of Harrow out of the swampland. He marries the cold, beautiful Creole aristocrat Odalie, loves her sister Aurore, and keeps the enslaved woman Desiree, building a dynasty across four decades. The novel follows Harrow from its glittering rise through the fever epidemics, feuds, and moral rot of the antebellum South, to its destruction in the Civil War, all rendered by an author who lets the reader see the human cost the plantation myth hides.