Gallows Way — Daoma Winston

In this spellbinding novel set in the rich tobacco country of the turbulent South just before the Civil War, Marietta Garvey marries a man she does not love yet cannot resist, in order to keep Galloway, the vast tobacco plantation with which she is obsessed. Marriage to Lafe Flynn ensures her hold on 'Gallows Way,' so-called because of its bloody past, but it also plunges her into a perilous intrigue of which she only later becomes aware. For the new master of Galloway is secretly involved in the Underground Railroad, a complex and dangerous means of helping runaway slaves reach freedom - a challenge to the deep-rooted traditions of the South. As the War Between the States becomes inevitable, Marietta finds that she must make a choice between her adored Galloway and the man she has slowly learned to love - a man whose visions of a new way of life must surely bring to ashes the only world Marietta knows.