Franco Patrese has left Pittsburgh and his painful past to start a new life in New Orleans as an FBI agent. The first day on the job he attends an important political party and a beautiful woman starts hitting on him, or so he thinks; really she's trying to warn him that something dark and twisted is going on and that she needs his help. Two days later, she shows up dead, her left leg cut off and a dead rattlesnake at her side. But she's only the first in a string of dismembered victims. As the bodies pile up, Patrese soon discovers a dark connection between the murders and Marie Laveau, who lived in New Orleans in the nineteenth century and styled herself the Voodoo Queen.