A disillusioned veteran of the Mexican-American War, Augustus Cain longs to head West and start a new life. But he'll need money to do so and, with few marketable skills, Augustus must rely on the morally bankrupt work of slave catching--retrieving runaways from the North and returning them to their former masters. When he's hired by a plantation owner to capture and return a runaway slave named Rosetta, Augustus tracks his quarry from Richmond to Boston and succeeds in capturing her. However, as he gets to know Rosetta and her story, he begins to question the morality of what he's doing in this absorbing novel about a nation on the verge of war.

Originally published: New York : William Morrow, 2007.