Ex-pagan and reluctantly clairvoyant reporter, Sara Wilde, thinks she escaped the curse of Wildefell Manor by planting shallow roots in Savannah. But Wildefell, her family's historic estate in idyllic Beaufort, South Carolina, still harbors a lurid secret.

When the brutal murders of her sister and grandmother send Sara back up the groaning steps of Wildefell, she discovers their bodies arranged in a manner reminiscent of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue. As corpses turn up all across the city, all mirroring victims in Gothic-era stories, and Sara begins to receive cryptic messages from the murderer, she realizes the curse blighting her family tree is branching out.

Plagued by premotions of the murders and the grotesque spirits of long-dead ancestors, Sara fears the only place she belongs is with the husk of her grief-stricken mother, in the asylum.

To break a story centuries in the making and stop a vicious killer, Sara must exhume the secrets of Wildefell Manor, or she'll risk losing both her family's legacy and her own mind.