Jade Dupree is a beautician and an undertaker’s assistant with a gift for smoothing the ravages of death from the faces of her clientele. But her strange talent isn’t the only thing that sets her apart from the townspeople of tiny Drexel, Mississippi. 

Jade is half-black and the unacknowledged bastard daughter of Drexel’s “first lady,” the imperious Lucille Longier. Jade’s... (read more)