Five years ago, Alexander Wolverton had everything: a thriving legal career, a Park Avenue penthouse, and a marriage he believed was unshakable.  Then his enviable life collapsed.  A jury convicted him of embezzling a prominent client’s funds—a crime he did not commit–destroying his reputation, costing him his freedom, and leaving him abandoned by everyone he once trusted. 

Recently paroled from New York’s infamous Fishkill Correctional Institution and determined to rebuild his life, Wolverton now manages an antiquarian bookstore in Manhattan, keeping his head down and his past buried.  His hope for a peaceful life is shattered when he unwittingly sells a grimoire purportedly written by voodoo queen Marie Laveau and sought after by a notorious drug kingpin and the head of a biotech startup.

Jacques Paris, a former Creole sharecropper who clawed his way from the bayou to the top of a New York narcotics empire, is convinced he is the widower of Laveau and the target of a curse she laid on him the night he abandoned her.  Now his body is rotting and his mind is fraying, and he wants only one thing: Laveau’s lost grimoire, which he believes holds the secret to reversing his decay.  

Jean-Luc Moreau, a brilliant Creole scientist whose struggling biotech startup is running out of time, believes its secrets point to a revolutionary anesthesia that could save his company and transform medicine.  

Paris sends his enforcer to retrieve the book by any means necessary but finds himself betrayed.  As a string of ritualistic murders traces back to Paris, Wolverton’s bookshop staff—including office manager Brigid O’Farrell, who discovers a voodoo doll made from her own hair on her doorstep—is pulled into the danger.

Detective Dante Addams chases the killings through New York’s Haitian exile community, while Brigid’s own digging turns up the possibility Paris may not be lying or suffering from dementia.  The novel never resolves whether Paris is a century-and-a-half-old bokor sustained by sacrificed hearts, or simply a man drowning in dementia who built an identity out of a dead man’s name.

Justice arrives not through Addams’s stalled investigation, but through Madame Baptiste, Paris’s mute housekeeper, a former mambo who sold her soul after her son’s death and has waited decades for this exact reckoning.  Aboard a private jet bound for New Orleans, she finally collects her debt.

Back at the bookshop, Addams brings Wolverton and a shaken Brigid news of Paris’s suspected death.  His drug empire is in ruins, Moreau has the grimoire, and the nightmare seems over.  But in the epilogue, Wolverton’s cat hisses at an empty shelf holding a doll made from his own hair, a nail piercing its chest—proof that Jacques Paris may not be finished with him yet.