"The bloody Civil War has ended at last, and Marshal Ridge Parkman is looking forward to visiting his family at last in exhausted, war-torn western Missouri. But no sooner has he settled in to relax and catch up on things, than whimsical fate drops a mission in front of him that he can hardly ignore. The next thing he knows, he's on a steamboat heading down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. His assignment is to track a father-son team who are fleeing with a satchel of stolen money, and who seem to enjoy leaving behind the corpses of murdered women wherever they go. It isn't until Parkman catches up to his prey in the raucous river city of Natchez that he realizes that he's not simply taking on the father and son. Instead, he faces an entrenched and well-run criminal enterprise that controls the more wicked and wide-open part of the city, known for decades as "Natchez Under the Hill.""-"--