Garnering praise from New York Times best-selling authors and prominent political strategist James Carville, “The Cottoncrest Curse” is an historically accurate, page-turning thriller from the multifaceted jazz pianist, media host, lawyer, law professor, and now debut novelist Michael H. Rubin .
“The Cottoncrest Curse” is set across multiple generations and tells a compelling and complex family story centered on itinerant peddler Jake Gold.
The bodies of an elderly colonel and his young wife are discovered on the staircase of their stately Louisiana plantation home. Within the sheltered walls of the Cottoncrest plantation, Augustine and Rebecca Chastaine have met their deaths under the same air of mystery as the colonel’s father, who committed suicide at the end of the Civil War. Locals whisper about the curse of Cottoncrest Plantation, but Sheriff Raifer Jackson knows that even a specter needs a mortal accomplice and rules the apparent murder/suicide a double homicide — with Jake as the prime suspect.
Assisted by his overzealous deputy, a grizzled Civil War physician, and the racist Knights of the White Camellia, the sheriff directs a manhunt through a village of former slaves, the swamps of Cajun country and the bordellos of New Orleans. But Jake’s chameleon-like abilities enable him to elude his pursuers. As a peddler who has built relationships by trading fabric, needles, dry goods and especially razor-sharp knives in exchange for fur, Jake knows the back roads of the small towns that dot the Mississippi River Delta, and Jake has many secrets to conceal, not the least of which is that he is a Jewish immigrant from Czarist Russia. Jake must stay one step ahead of his pursuers while trying to keep one final promise before more lives are lost and he loses the chance to clear his name.
“The Cottoncrest Curse” takes readers on the bold journey of Jake’s flight within an epic sweep of treachery and family rivalry ranging from the Civil War to the civil rights era as the impact of the 1893 murders ripples through the 20th century and violence besets the owners of Cottoncrest into the 1960s.
“Michael Rubin proves himself to be an exceptional storyteller in his novel, ‘The Cottoncrest Curse,’” says Carville, who knows Louisiana intimately. “The powerful epic is expertly composed in both its historical content and beautifully constructed scenery. I highly recommend picking up this book to catch a glimpse into life and conflict during the height of the Old South.”
Rubin hits the road this fall to discuss and sign copies of “The Cottoncrest Curse” on his cross-country book tour. As a nationally known legal ethicist and humorist, he has given more than 375 major presentations throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
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