Through ten interconnected true-crime stories, this historical account captures a South Carolina county's most violent decade--a time when bullets felled a mayor, a police chief, and a beloved bookseller, each in separate shocking incidents.

Illustrated with dozens of photographs, the book also delves into the exploits of a crooked local attorney who became one of nation's most slippery con men, the controversial hanging of a teenaged girl, and the bedlam unleashed when a governor tried to crush the moonshine trade. All this chaos and more unfolds amid Spartanburg's first economic boom, as cotton mills multiply across the county, the community becomes one of the South's rising industrial powers, generating many great fortunes.