Working as an indentured servant alongside slaves on a tobacco plantation, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, finds her light skin and situation placing her between two very different worlds that test her loyalties.

After cheating the hangman twice--once after the Battle of Culloden in Scotland and again at Marshalsea Prison--Jamie MacGillivray is sentenced to indentured servitude in colonial America where he teams up with a poor village girl similarly sentenced through serfdom, revolt, escape, and romantic entanglements.

Alice Cole spent her first seven years living in two smoky, crowded rooms in London with her family. But a new home and a better life waited in the colonies, or so her father promised--a bright dream that turned to ashes when her brothers and mother took ill and died during the arduous voyage. Arriving in colonial New England unable to meet the added expenses incurred by their misfortunes at sea, her father bound Alice into servitude to pay his debts....

"A famous riverboat singer poses as a slave owner in order to lead runaway slaves to freedom and save her own life in this powerful novel from the bestselling author of The Librarian of Boone's Hollow"--