Pendergast--the world's most enigmatic FBI Special Agent--returns to to investigate a murderous cult.

William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wife Nora Kelly, a of archaeologist, are brutally attacked in their apartment on 's . Eyewitnesses claim, and the security camera confirms, that the assailant was their strange, sinister neighbor--a man who, by all reports, was already dead and buried weeks earlier. While Captain Laura Hayward leads the official investigation, Pendergast and Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta undertake their own private--and decidedly unorthodox--quest for the truth. Their serpentine journey takes them to an enclave of they never imagined could exist: a secretive, reclusive cult of Obeah and vodou which no outsiders have ever survived.