A Russian mail-order bride, raised in the cultural grandeur of Moscow, lands in the cottonfields of the Mississippi Delta. "The Gulag could not be so desolate!"-is Kat's reaction to the flat greenness of cotton. But Kat has secret reasons for coming to America. She has no intention of staying with her prospective husband, Joe Leigh, a pilot. A swampy island lies along the Mississippi River, haunted by an old plantation that was abandoned during the 1800s. Because of its isolation, an asylum was built onto the plantation house where bizarre experiments were performed. The asylum, too, was abandoned after the 1940s. Even so, weird tales remain of men being made into monkeys. Politicians are disappearing from the Delta. A pilot also vanishes who regularly flew these persons to a secret location in Arkansas. Among rows of cotton is a motel disguised as an equipment shed, where politicians are bribed, drugged, and soothed with live entertainment. The borsht-and-cabbage-soup versus BBQ-and -fried chicken controversy continues between Kat and Joe, who occupy Joe's white house with the green roof under a pecan grove. Joe who refuses any involvement in the Arkansas enterprise is compromised nonetheless, and both he and Kat are endangered. Ahead of them looms that bizarre island and a dark presence of unfathomable evil. In this web of death, the challenge is to stay alive. Will romance also carry the day? Alas, Kat cannot survive the Delta. Or can she?