UNKNOWN

It was the '90s in Charleston, SC. Cell phones were becoming a thing. Martha Stewart hadn't gone to prison. Bill Clinton has not "had sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky."

The edges of the town were now an anarchic sprawl of unrestrained growth. Fast food, asphalt, car lots with giant American flags. But at the bottom of the peninsula, the old families clung to the myth of timeless Charleston while grasping at any source of income.

One thing they had a nose for was valuable artifacts because so many had lived for so long selling off heirlooms one by one.

The discovery of a super-rare Tiverton commode has them in a frenzy of greed, and murder seems a logical outcome.

An odd mix of characters gets embroiled.

• Honor Revenue, divinity professor's daughter and heart-stopping beauty who has spent her short life warding off obsessive nuts.
• South-of-Broad drone Chandler Lovelace who has never held a job but knows his furniture.
• Simpering twit Rusty Royall, Rector of the august St. Ambrose, who believes he's in thrall to a witch.
• Talisha Mackey who's trying to hold together a bankrupt gospel radio station while fending off the advances of a love-obsessed, decrepit root doctor.
• Beau-Jack McCully, good ol' boy trickster who is a deft hand at furniture reproduction.
• Plus assorted thieves, outlaws, and bunco artist men of the cloth. While Rannie Ralston, the meanest lawyer in Charleston, watches and schemes.

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."