African American Tucker Rice is enjoying his retirement, and with good cause. A career as one of Memphis, Tennessee's first black FBI Agents is solidly and successfully behind him. His private investigator practice is growing. On the home front, he and his wife are thrilled with their new house outside Memphis, and their daughter has been accepted at prestigious Vanderbilt University. When, on a rainy Sunday morning, he receives a phone call from Sheriff Johnny Beaumont, an old fishing buddy in a primitive rural county north of Memphis, he can scarcely be expected to comprehend what he is stepping into. "Ah got me three dead bodies, two blacks and one white. Cause of death: severe heart trauma. Looks like the last thing these ole boys saw literally scared them to death." When, with the help of his former partner, FBI Special Agent Chick Fuller, Tucker assists in the investigation, events soon take a bizarre turn. The trail leads Tucker and Chick far from the reassuring comforts of their contemporary lifestyles, into the feral and untamed bogs of western Tennessee along the Mississippi River-where old ways still prevail, dark stories and superstitions from the past are still whispered and believed, and where a fearsome old Negro tale about a malevolent spirit from the Civil War named Colonel Banshee still lives on.