John Briggs, a career detective in Gulfport, Louisiana, doesn't need any more excitement in his life right now: he's a single dad trying to raise a teenage son. But this new case he's been assigned to is getting scary in a hurry. He's worked the narcotics beat for twenty years; he's used to watching junkies kill themselves, one fix at a time. What he's not used to is junkies that go berserk and kill other people-lots of other people. What he's not used to is junkies that keep coming at you even after they've been shot, even after they've been set on fire. Then one of his informants tips him off that there's something new on the street: a drug called Must that just might be the cause of the crime wave. And nobody knows where it's coming from. The only clue John is able turn up seems like a strange one: while searching for Must on the Internet he stumbles across musth, the state of sexual arousal that causes bull elephants to rampage. Well, "rampage" is a pretty fair description of what drug addicts have been doing all over his town, but elephants? Still, figuring a strange clue is better than no clue at all, John follows up with Jill Relson, a pachyderm expert at the local zoo. Only to find out he's as much interested in her as he is getting to the bottom of the case. Together, John and Jill start digging. But the trouble with digging is you tend to find things. Old things. Dead things. Things that won't stay dead. Which maybe doesn't matter so long as those things are on the other side of an ocean. But when a lifelong friend of Jill's is kidnapped in Kenya and she flies over there to help in spite of John's frantic warnings, he has a decision to make. Should he follow Jill to Africa to try and rescue her from God-knows-what kind of trouble? Or should he stay put for what is shaping up to be a junkie apocalypse on the streets of his hometown?