When marine buddy, Gulfport, Mississippi Sheriff asks Craige Ingram for help, Ingram and Buckingham Parish patrolman 'Badger' Thomas Boback find themselves in the summertime dogdays of the humid Gulf Coast. With crowded beaches and an undermanned staff, a routine investigation soon becomes anything but routine when indescribable body parts start showing up along the surf, in beachfront cabins, half-buried in bayou wetlands, stashed under freeway bridges, and across county lines. Craige's search for answers to identifying victims and killer among the crowds of tourists and skin-and-sun partygoers soon makes it obvious the victims have no connection with one another-until conflicting DNA results and haunting premonitions resembling the warnings Craige's grannie often had become part of the investigation. The jigsaw of abandoned cross-kin offspring begin a horrifying Gordian Knot tangle that threatens anyone who approaches the shadowy ancient wreck of an old mansion - an asylum from a lost time.