A sleepy Kansas burg awakens to the horror of a mortician operating on the wrong side of death.

Guy Driscoll can't stand his teenage daughter, but he loves her literally to death when he drags her out of Chicago and plants her in the middle of tiny Colson, Kansas, where he hopes she'll adopt small town values and learn to hate him less. His plan fails, and the antipathy continues with beautiful Michael Bish, a female police officer Guy mistakenly lambastes for shooting local mortician Vernon Diest in the back. Michael claims it was self-defense, but few in town want to believe that Vernon Diest, descendant of Colson's founding fathers, is capable of such malice. Only Elma, the deaf-mute stepsister of Vernon, knows the truth. Elma, who lives somewhere on the third floor of the Diest mansion steals food from Vernon's refrigerator at night. She knows more about Vernon than she will ever be able to reveal, and it will take the light of a telling moon, a perfect summer moon, to awaken the people of Colson to the nightmare in their midst.