No one--not even her best friend, Charles Butler--knows anything about Mallory's life before she showed up at age 10 in New York, already an accomplished thief and pickpocket. Now Mallory has vanished, only to turn up months later in the backwater Louisiana town where her childhood disappeared. Charles, who follows her, is unsurprised to find her in the town jail, a prisoner of the sheriff who knew her as little Kathy Shelley, whose mother was stoned to death years earlier. The only reminder of the town's most ignominious moment is the stone angel in the town cemetery, a monument to Cass Shelley's horrible death. Mallory has been planning her revenge for years, and now that the moment is here, a mere jail cell won't stop her. The fact that her method of revenge is both brilliantly calculated and utterly terrifying will come as no surprise to those familiar with the cold, cold soul of the always mesmerizing Kathleen Mallory. Is O'Connell's latest a dark voodoo tale? A mystical fairy fable? A sad, gentle love story? A suspense-filled tale of hatred and revenge? Or a horrifying exposeof fundamentalist cults and small-town secrets?