Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialised in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. But the lessons of that revelation - to be careful of men, and desire - are not just Grace's to learn. Her family's tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of...