It's the '90s in Charleston, and urban sprawl is fast killing the charm. A tiny pocket of mansions South-of-Broad Street preserve the dying way of life.
Bracey Fanseau Jeffcoat has a miserable marriage to an investment swindler and an even unhappier outlook on the death of natural beauty in the Lowcountry. Her husband Chase is in league with property developer ya-hoos to put the last of the Sea Islands under golf courses and condos. They will steal and even murder for the big score.
Tamzie Jerome has come into money, but everyone is hell bent on stealing it from her.
And perky golf hustler Bobbi-Jean Kincaid is switch-walking through the fairways and lustful males of this world with her own angle on shot-making and money-making.
While lurking at the fringe sharpening her claws is the meanest lawyer in town, the flame-haired Rannie Ralston you've met twice before. She can lay a dam' lawsuit on you or use a gun if it's called for.
If the dollar sums in the story seem small, remember how long ago this was. And inflation just keeps eating up the dollar. One day soon, it'll be as dead as some of the characters in the story wind up.
MARGOT SINCLAIR played front-row volleyball at Ashley Hall and studied ornithology at Cornell. She spends her winters in Barbour coats and Bean boots, owns her father's Purdey shotgun, and can pole a boat over a marsh at flood tide when the clapper rails can be seen among theSpartina grass. Her grandparents were part of the Second Yankee Invasion of the South. Between roughly 1888 to 1940, Northern industrial wealth purchased vast tracts of worn-out cotton land, cut-over timberland, and abandoned rice fields. They restored old plantation houses or built new ones, and turned their estates into hunting preserves for duck, quail, turkey, and deer. The railroad brought resort towns to inehurst, Camden, Aiken, and Thomasville-golf, racehorses, polo, and quail. Each winter, the Sinclairs migrated from Tuxedo Park, New York, to Run-a-Gate Hall on the banks of the Cooper River above Charleston. Margot's father was born there as she was much later. She is so much a part of the Lowcountry that she considers herself a valid "ben-ya."
