UNKNOWN

It's Stealing Time!

It's Charleston, South Carolina, in the '90s. The old ways are on life support, living on stolen time.

Beautiful Dale Ralston has finally had enough of her cheating husband, Collier, a state senator, rabid collector of Civil War manuscripts, and general douchebag.

Collier is out of the house, but what does Dale do with a collection that is entirely stolen?

Everyone has the same idea: They should have it.

Collier's sister Rannie, the meanest lawyer in Charleston, sees it patching the spending tsunami of her rapacious mother and dingbat sister.

A college boy wannabe hitman pitches it as business diversification to the Dixie Mafia.

The sassy maid Tamzie sold a slave diary to Collier cheap and has wised up. She sees it as a trade-up ticket from her gangsta boyfriend to a college archivist.

And there's a mysterious stranger in town nosing around who may be . . . well, who knows?

The result is mayhem and malicious malarkey out the wazoo. Everyone's stealing something, and someone's going to end up dead.

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."