Distilled in Texas and the Delta, a straight-no-chaser crime novel set around the legendary Dixie Mafia Manfred Eugene "Hog" Webern, a retired Dallas County deputy sheriff, is talked into going undercover in Biloxi, Mississippi, in a multistate effort to nail a group of traveling Southern criminals who have been tagged by the press with the lurid name "Dixie Mafia." After making contact with the gangs nominal leader, the notorious Jasper Sparks, Webern begins to worm his way into the groups confidence. He also meets and becomes involved with an old friend of Sparks, the mysterious Nell Bigelow, a former assistant federal prosecutor whose daddy "owns half the Delta." Having gained the gangs trust, Webern soon learns that the score being planned is the massive robbery of a wintering carnival of an entire years receipts. Joining in planning the job, he meets such well-known hijackers as Slops Moline, a Charleston, South Carolina, killer and armed robber; Lardass Collins, the countrys premier car thief; Tom-Tom Reed, one of the worlds most skilled safecrackers; and the infamous Raymond "Hardhead" Weller, an Alabama-born moonshiner who has pulled off more than two dozen high-profile contract killings in his seventy years. As the story develops, Webern is drawn into a maelstrom of robbery, mayhem, and senseless violence that threatens to engulf his very being. And before the final curtain falls on The Sweet and the Dead, we learn that in the murky world of Southern professional crime, nothing is ever quite what it seems to be.