ISBN 0-312-85707-1 (US pbk)

"The shades of a dark and violent past have reached out and taken the lives of the innocent.

"Austin Tucker was a Green Beret, a man with lightning reflexes and the training to use them. His life was shattered one Thanksgiving night when strangers invaded his home and killed his family. Tucker was never able to convince anyone that strangers had incinerated his daughter, killed his wife, and ritually sacrificed his son. He went to prison for it.

"Derek Waites was once an outlaw computer hacker, the infamous Captain Africa. Now he designs games, and works hard to make a living good enough to support his son and daughter, and win back his estranged wife. But one Saturday afternoon someone tried to kidnap his son while his daughter cried a warning and narly burst into flames.

"The two men can have nothing in common -- Tucker is a white man from the suburbs, an ally of the Aryan Brotherhood in prison, a killer with very little left to lose. Waites is a black street-hustler trying to go straight, with little use for the power structure and a very healthy fear of White Supremacists.

"But there is a powerful link between them, forged two hundred years before; forged in the brutality of their ancestors' lives on the same southern plantation. Two hundred years ago, an African sorcerer bought his freedom by teaching his white master the secret of immortality -- immortality won through the blood sacrifice of one's own children.

"Austin Tucker's children, and Derek Waites's children, are descendants of that immortal slave-owner. Ten years before, Austin's son was chosen for the sacrifice. Now it is Derek's boy's turn.

"But the two men are brothers in blood, and brothers in the same cause, and if Tucker and Waites can resolve their differences long enough to work together, they can defeat this ancient evil. Between them they have the skills and the knowledge to break the cycle of predation. Tucker will have his revenge, and Waites will save his children's lives -- and the lives of children in generations yet to come." [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1996]

"Steven Barnes is that most wonderful of wonders, a person who can really write. This is not postmodern pyrotechnics, but the creation of real characters... people we can relate to, people whose thoughts and feelings resonate with something deep within our souls.

"Steven Barnes has written a true page-turner, where technique is second nature and subservient to the story. A story which encompasses the extremes of love and hate, the dichotomies of good and evil, and the mysteries of men and women. This is a fiction of inner and outer confrontation... containing personal catharsis and resolution. Straight talk about deep issues." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , January 1998).