In South Carolina, a young black man faces the death penalty for the rape and murder of the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the state It's a case nobody wants to touch, a case with its roots in old evil, and old evil is private detective Charlie Parker's speciality But Parker is about to enter a living nightmare, haunted by the murderous spectre of a hooded woman, a black car waiting for a passenger that never comes, and by the complicity of both friends and enemies in the events surrounding the death