FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast - recently returned to New York - and Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta find themselves investigating the murder of a friend when reporter William Smithback and his wife Nora are brutally attacked in their apartment. The assailant is identified by eyewitnesses as their strange, sinister neighbour - a man who, by all accounts, died ten days earlier.

Shunning the official inquiry, Pendergast and D'Agosta undertake their own private - and unorthodox - quest for the truth. Their journey takes them deep into the dark and mysterious underbelly of Manhattan, to a secretive, reclusive cult of Obeah and voodoo which no outsiders have ever survived...