Maggie Stark, a retired homicide detective, hopes to escape the nightmares and death that surround her family and former career. To this end, she leaves San Francisco with her eight year old son, Billy, and returns to her home town. But Starkville is not her salvation, as she had hoped. Violence erupts all around her. And when Deputy Sheriff Sam Waters calls on her investigative acumen to solve a puzzling and brutal murder-suicide, she is reluctant, yet resigned, to help him with the strange and eerie mystery.

The investigation takes a bizarre twist when she and Sam become embroiled with a one hundred and fifty year old Chinese man named Wing Sun. Only Wing Sun knows the deadly secret concerning the outbreak of violence that infects the town! Only he knows how to destroy the evil invading Starkville!