On Maryland's salt-swept Eastern Shore, a woman reporter has a dilapidated old house, a dysfunctional family, and a talent for solving mysteries. How does wisecracking, love-burned Hollis Ball find out so much about other people's secrets? Just ask the ghost at her side.

Once he was her husband--and not a very good one at that. Now Sam Wescott is a ghost. And what he lacks in respect for Hollis's privacy, he makes up in his ability to talk to the dead. For Hollis, Sam's talent has never come in handier. A vintage Cadillac has been resurrected from the muddy waters beneath a highway bridge, and in it are the bones of a woman. Now a community of fishermen, crabbers, and local boys-turned-millionaires is being ripped apart by a mysterious death thirty years old. And when another body is found in Chesapeake Bay, Hollis and Sam join forces: to catch a killer who is alive and all too well....