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Can the living haunt the dead?
Dorcas and nine-year-old daughter Tana DeWitt are killed in a car crash with a drunk driver. Sam DeWitt buries his wife and little girl in the God’s Acre of his father’s farm. That should been the end of this tragedy.
But a flood washes away all the corpses in the God’s Acre. Dorcas and Tana’s bodies are recovered, but then Dorcas’ spiteful first husband, property developer John Leland, sues for custody of the bodies and, with the help of a friendly judge, wins. Sam appeals the decision, but Leland is free to entomb Dorcas and Tana in his family’s crypt.
Happy to have won his wife back, Leland never bothers to visit the crypt. Sam does, however, and one day discovers it has been broken in to and Tana’s corpse stolen.
That night Dorcas’ spirit begins haunting Sam and Leland. Tana is in danger, she insists. More danger than she ever was in when alive.
In this horror novel, a psychic pedophile named Fred Bailey steals Tana’s body after seeing the girl’s picture during the media’s coverage of the custody trail.
Bailey’s plan is elementary but hardly simple. He wants to have sex with Tana’s ghost. Being psychic, he can do this…BUT only so long as he possesses her body (which gives him control over her spirit) and can find a volunteer to host Tana’s ghost. A ghost can only have sex with the living, it seems, either through the dreams of a past lover or while possessing a living person’s body.
So Bailey needs a receptacle. Preferably a willing one. He finds one when he seduces 15-year-old runaway Tracy Halfman, a poor-little-rich girl who falls in love with the "kind" and handsome Bailey. Afraid Bailey will abandon her if she refuses, Tracy agrees to host Tana’s spirit for sex.
Meanwhile Sam and Leland search for Tana with Dorcas’ help. Dorcas is their guide through the spirit world, the realm of eleemosynary ghosts and rapacious wraiths that co-exists alongside the living, typically but not always out of sight. But there are problems.
The spirit world is unfamiliar territory to Sam, Leland, and even Dorcas, a new ghost. This gives the psychic Bailey home field advantage. He knows his way around the spirit world, and even has friends there who will aid and protect him. Bailey also suspects he can seduce Leland into betraying Sam and Dorcas if Bailey were to offer to show Leland how to do to Dorcas what Bailey did to Tana.
What Bailey does not know is that Tracy is jealous of Tana, not to mention somewhat unhinged from serving as the ghost’s host. Tracy would like to get rid of Tana, which she discovers she can do if she disposes of Tana’s corpse. And how hard could that be? Just some lighter fluid and a match ought to do the trick. Then she and Bailey can be alone together forever.
