In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, a middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse.

This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life. In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice weaves this brilliant fiction, capturing the ineffable mood and complex humanity of black urban life at a moment in our century we assumed we understood.