Benjamin January, a Creole physician and piano teacher who has known the glories of Paris as well as of his native New Orleans, is at the Blue Ribbon Ball during Mardi Gras. Near the ball, Angelique Crozat, an octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, is found murdered--and there is no shortage of suspects. This novel transports the reader to the center of the cosmopolitan South in an age when both its glories and the forces which would tear it apart are equally in evidence.