In the timber camps of North Florida in the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston discovered the unwritten segregationist law of "paramour rights." Twenty years later, she received an assignment from the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the trial of a wealthy colored woman accused of murdering her white physician and Florida state senator-elect lover, Dr. C. Leroy Adams. Intrigued by what she considered a case of paramour rights, Hurston accepted the assignment for a story she described as having "all the drama and varied play of human emotions that fill the pages of great literature form Plutarch to Shakespeare." (Taken from back of the book.).