Young Greenwich Village pastry chef Greenie Duquette's strained marriage to a depressed psychiatrist is pushed to the breaking point when the governor of New Mexico offers her a job at his restaurant across the country and she accepts, taking her four-year-old son with her.

"J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nearly 50 years ... was feared, admired, reviled and revered, a man who could distort the truth as easily as he upheld it. His methods were at once ruthless and heroic, with the admiration of the world his most coveted prize. But behind closed doors, he held secrets that would have destroyed his image, his career and his life"--Container.

Elsa Mars is the proprietor of a troupe of human "curiosities" on a desperate journey of survival in the sleepy hamlet of Jupiter, Florida, in 1952. Her menagerie of performers includes a two-headed, telepathic twin, a take-charge bearded lady, a vulnerable strongman, and his three-breasted wife. But strange emergence of an entity will savagely threaten the lives of the townsfolk and freaks alike.