Lilith Stark knows from experience that dead doesn't necessarily mean gone. Gettysburg took Joab's life, but her husband struck a bargain with Heaven to come home instead. She's not about to turn away whatever the Yankees have left to her of their all-too-brief marriage. But when she inadvertently lets slip to the neighbors that not only has Joab come home, but one of the neighbor boys as well, she ignites a town already rubbed raw by the endless sorrows of civil war.
Lilith, hoping to salvage the situation, only puts her foot in it deeper when she offers the good people of Browns Corners, Virginia, the benefits of her strange and perhaps saintly father's magic elixir. With the neighbors fighting over the elixir, the Reverend Fisk convinced she's the lying daughter of a shiftless devil, and the bereaved mother of the ghost living in Lilith's barn turning the whole town against her, Lilith's happy penchant for creating unexpected rainbows curdles to a despairing gathering of black creepers instead.
A private little war between Lilith and the Reverend leads to a very public confrontation in which Lilith will either get the town to accept her--magic, ghosts, and all--or find herself locked away as a madwoman, deprived of everything that makes her life worthwhile.
