That's what the Cherokee call the evil spirit that dwells within an ancient knife used to murder a young woman in a small college town outside Diamond Springs, North Carolina.

With her Aunt Selma's new beau, Sam Two Rivers, arrested for the crime and all evidence pointing heavily toward him, newly re-elected Sheriff Sharyn Howard finds herself unwillingly, yet obligingly, drawn into the crime, which is outside her jurisdiction. Determined to help her friend and aunt, Sharyn attempts the impossible. She's already up to her ears in a series of house robberies and short a deputy who was downed by a rabid raccoon.

But by working outside her county with a greasy police chief and his belligerent assistant, she willend a mystery involving a string of unsolved murders that date back to the Civil War.