In Harlem, 1926, Joe Trace, a door-to-door salemsan in his fifties, kills his teenage lover. At the funeral, his wife Violet slashes the dead girl's face and then desperately searches to find why Joe was unfaithful. The profound love story is immersed in the sights and sounds of Black urban life during the Jazz Age.

Historian Lucas Page visits St. Louis to give a reading. Among the attendees is someone he does not expect: Lola Faye Gilroy, the "other woman" he has long blamed for his father's murder decades earlier. Now he must discover why Lola Faye has come and what she is after--before it is too late.