Robert Carroll had established Carroll Investigative Services after retiring from the Indianapolis Police Department three years earlier. He had since built a reputation as one of the most effective private investigators in the state of Indiana. However, nothing he had experienced in his long law enforcement career prepared him for the challenge he found himself involved in after his administrative assistant inadvertently brought the grieving grandparents of the victim of a mysterious murder into his life at just the point where he had decided he needed a vacation. He intended to give the potential clients a courteous intake interview, followed by a plausible excuse to decline the case, and a referral to another investigator. However, Carroll soon found himself sympathetically enmeshed with the elderly couple and - with vacation plans on hold - walking the turn-of-the-20th century streets of Fitzgerald, in a sleepy little town in South Georgia, where it would not take long for him to learn the feisty, sharp-tongued, 111-year-old, African American, sole -surviving daughter of the town's founding generation was the key to solving the recent crime as well as a 119-year-old murder-connected puzzle of a long lost fortune in gold and Confederate dollars which had set the scene for the current mystery. Along the way, he learns how to speak the language of the South and how to defer to the instinctive insight of one who had always known a good man when she met one -- whether he was the great great grandson of a Civil War veteran or a modern day big city police detective. Murder solved and his informal adoption into the family of his crime-solving elderly "Aunt Ruth" completed, Detective Carroll signs off with the intimated promise of more to come. Readers will, no doubt, want more!