Joe Trace – in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband – shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse.

"Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past, not in fiction today”