In Black Water Rising, Attica Locke made one of the most stunning fiction debuts in recent memory. Now she returns with The Cutting Season, a riveting thriller that intertwines two murders separated by over a century.

Caren Gray manages Belle Vie, a sprawling antebellum plantation-turned-tourist attraction where the past and the present coexist uneasily. Outside the gates, an ambitious corporation has been snapping up sugar cane fields from struggling families, replacing local employees with illegal laborers. Tensions mount when the body of a female migrant worker is found in a shallow grave on the property, her throat cut clean.

The police zero in on a suspect but Caren fears they're chasing the wrong leads. Putting herself at risk, she unearths startling new facts about the long-ago disappearance of a former slave that has unsettling ties to the modern-day crime. In pursuit of the truth about Belle Vie's history—and her own—Caren discovers secrets about both cases that an increasingly desperate killer will do anything to keep hidden.