Victor Carl - lawyer, loser, hapless hero of Hostile Witness, and a Philadelphian way out of his element - has come to the sweat-drenched jungles of Belize to chase his fortune. Finding it is one thing. Living long enough to enjoy it is something else entirely. Coerced into defending an unpleasant parade of mob enforcers, two-bit hoods, and other Philadelphia riffraff, Carl wants out of his shabby, squalid life more than ever. So when a terrified young woman offers Carl an unusual - but substantial - proposition, he leaps at the opportunity to trade in his grubby existence for a life of wealthy excess. The job - proving that the recent suicide of wealthy Philadelphia heiress Jacqueline Shaw was not a suicide at all but murder - plunges Carl into an eerie shadow world, where events buried deep in the past exert an awful weight in the present, a world of overturned gravesites, gruesome secrets, and a haunted, lonely estate that houses the broken and dying heirs of a once-powerful family. Simultaneously caught up in an exploding mob war and the machinations of an avaricious cult, Carl realizes too late that he's in way over his head, as he races against time to collect his fee and get out alive.