No one will help a young mother search for her missing son; no one can stop her. 

Cama Truesdale’s ex-husband and six year-old son have just left Boston for a "boys only" fishing trip in South Carolina’s Low Country, a place filled with secrets from Cama's own childhood. In the early morning hours, Cama gets a call. There’s been a fire on board the boat. Her ex-husband is dead and her son is missing. No one believes he survived the fire. Except Cama.

Cama's search for her son raises disturbing memories of the mysterious car crash that killed her black mother and white father when she was a child. Plagued by haints and hags—or perhaps simply hallucinations brought on by the tea brewed by a Gullah conjure doctor—Cama enters a world in which she must trust instinct over fact, and where nothing is what it seems—not even the boundary between the living and the dead.