Follows Pulitzer Prize nominee Claudia Johnson's nineteen year quest to penetrate the mysterious silence surrounding the story of Ruby McCollum, the educated wife of numbers racketeer 'Bolita' Sam and the richest African American woman in Live Oak, Florida, sentenced to the electric chair for the 1952 murder of her white doctor and alleged lover, LeRoy Adams. Ruby was never allowed to tell her story, on the stand or to reporters, so no one, including Zora Neale Hurston, who covered the notoriously unfair trial, could say why Ruby did it. She didn't, as Johnson comes to believe when two courageous African Americans risk everything and break the long silence imposed by Live Oak's corrupt white power structure.—Anonymous