Wes Block is a detective who's put on the case of a serial killer whose victims are young and pretty women. The murders are getting personal when the killer chooses victims who are acquaintances of Block. Even his daughters are threatened.

Ex-slave and former Union soldier Gideon Jackson represents other ex-slaves at the constitutional convention, and is soon elected to the U.S. Senate despite opposition from white landowners, law enforcement and the KKK. He unites with sharecropper Abner Lait, who helps Jackson unite ex-slaves and white tenant farmers.

A bubble-brained Philadelphia waitress witnesses a murder during the Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans and finds herself stalked by the killer.

Hattie, a New Orleans prostitute, meets a photographer named Bellocq at her brothel one night and, after he photographs her, he befriends her 12-year-old daughter, Violet. When Violet is brought on as a working girl by her mother's madam and Hattie skips town to get married, Violet quickly loses her innocence and focuses on reuniting with Bellocq. But a life with Bellocq is compromised for Violet after her mother returns to town.