“A Voodoo ritual?” Emmett stared dumbly at her. A young man from Maine fights for social equality in New Orleans after the Civil War while pursuing a murderer of prostitutes, becoming enmeshed in voodoo, and falling in love. “Education is the tool that makes us all equal, whether we are Black, white, Indian, woman, or man,” Manon said. Much like Louisiana’s famous gumbo, Love in A Time of Hate, is a spicy dish of varied ingredients. The main theme is the struggle for social equality between the whites, Blacks, and Creoles, but flavor is added with the subplots of politics, voodoo, murder, love, and hate. And then came the Rebel scream, a sound Emmett had not heard since near the end of the Great War. New Orleans becomes a literal battleground as carpetbaggers, scalawags, Creoles, and recently freed slaves fight against the entrenched southern plantation notion of white superiority.