In 1958, Barbadian Mark Maynard learns that his father has been murdered in America, shot dead on a sidewalk in New York City. He rushes to New York where he finds the case has been abandoned due to the lack of a single reliable witness. He vows never to return home until the killer is caught and brought to justice, either by a system of laws or by his own hands. His suspicions rest on those who were in his father's inner circle: Angela Santana, a lady friend of his father, who was in his company on the night of his death, her cuckold husband, Glenn Corbin, and an affiliate of the New York Mafia, Bruno Giuseppe, who also might have wanted him dead. He also learns of his late father's unconventional affairs in a society not yet receptive to interracial couples. He is befriended by his father's bedmate, Maria Townsend.After sixteen long years, a trail of blood leads him to Montgomery, Alabama, where he is rudely awakened to a divided America, one of strict segregated laws. But by virtue of walking in his father's footsteps, he also finds himself in a transracial love affair of his own, a relationship forbidden in the South. The woman is Paula Schroeder, the daughter of Senator Gilmore Schroeder, a reputed Klansman. The affair renders him a target of the notorious Ku Klux Klan.With her connections, she passes to Mark a trove of her father's secret plans to launch a chapter of the KKK in New York. The incriminating secrets form the basis of a book he writes and hopes to publish to trap the killer. But the book becomes a lightning rod attracting unto itself a series of assaults and killings. From the South to the North he finds himself caught in a web of terror. Will he find his father's killer before he himself is killed. Will a father's footsteps also lead his son to his grave?
