Provides descriptions and illustrations of approximately two hundred of the most common snakes, turtles, lizards, frogs and toads, salamanders, alligators, and crocodiles of North America.

The shaky marriage between Henry McAllan and his city-bred wife Laura becomes even more unstable when his brother Jamie returns from World War II in 1946 to help work the family's miserable cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta, along with his comrade-in-arms Ronsel Jackson, the oldest son of local sharecroppers, who soon learns that his heroics in battle mean nothing in the Jim Crow south.