Even for 1927 New Orleans, a city that has seen the utmost in sanctity and sin, the story is shocking. Somebody has taken the life of Father Patrick Walsh, the city's most beloved priest. The scene of the crime: an abandoned waterfront warehouse. The method of killing: torture. Yet most shattering of all is the astonishing secret Father Walsh had hoped to take to his grave.
Daman Rourke, the homicide cop who fights hard and hurts easy, knows the killer is arrogant but cunning. He knows that this slaying of a good priest comes from a place deep and dark in the soul. He also knows that he'll have to walk a fine line of danger, in a town already seething over the pending execution of a young black man. At the same time, teenage girls devoted to the cult of Remy Lelourie, reigning queen of the silent screen, are turning up dead one after another.
And Rourke's brother, Paulie, himself a priest, confides to him a transgression with a soul-shattering payback.
Seeking the blood-red thread that connects these seemingly random events, Rourke is about to unmask a monster and rediscover the truth he has never denied: that some things stay mysteries, especially when they live in the human heart.