Our saga began with a mysterious hit-and-run accident on a narrow, snow-swept highway in eastern North Carolina at 7:15 p.m. on December 20, 1920.

It ended three months later in a hail of gunfire on the fourth-deck passageway of a Panama-bound steamship in Baltimore harbor.

Could these two seminal events relate to the presumed accidental deaths of seventeen elderly residents of five rural North Carolina Coastal Plain counties, each of whom just happened to be the last surviving member of his or her line? The authorities were mystified.

Perhaps the reader should not expect a happy ending. Interesting? Immensely. Predictable? Absolutely not. Another page-turner? Most assuredly.