<b>Pendergast, the world&apos;s most mysterious FBI Special Agent, investigates a murderous cult in New York City that no one has ever survived.</b><br />William Smithback, a <i>New York Times</i> reporter, and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archaeologist, are brutally attacked in their apartment on Manhattan&apos;s Upper West Side. Eyewitnesses claim, and the security camera confirms, that the assailant was their strange, sinister neighbor--a man who, by all reports, was already dead and buried weeks earlier.<br />While Captain Laura Hayward leads the official investigation, Pendergast and Lieutenant Vincent D&apos;Agosta undertake their own private--and decidedly unorthodox--quest for the truth. Their serpentine journey takes them to an enclave of Manhattan they never imagined could exist: a secretive, reclusive cult of Obeah and vodou which no outsiders have ever survived.