Olivia Stowe

Slave to the Past Olivia Stowe

The eleventh Charlotte Diamond mystery is one of pulling up the past to clutch at those in the present. The book finds retired FBI senior agent Charlotte Diamond and her spouse, senior movie star Brenda Boynton/Brandon, taking a long-delayed vacation on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina with Charlotte's brother, Chance Diamond, and his wife, Marilyn. Brenda is there to participate in a celebrity golf tournament and attend two film nights in nearby Charleston and Savannah. The real purpose of the "vacation," however, is that Charlotte is helping old friend and beau, Evan Worthington, track down a sex slave operation possibly using the nearby Daufuskie Island. Connections with the past abound in the book-Charlotte and Brenda with former men friends; Marilyn Diamond, in medical distress, with her own historical past; Brenda's son, the actor Tony Trice, with a former lover in the midst of current marital difficulties; and other, local characters with connections to slavery and each other going back to late eighteenth-century South Carolina low country history. As each character struggles with the enslavement of her or his own past, their histories become crossed and the mystery of the sex slave trade in the low country deepens around them and threatens their mere existence.