Sheriff Dan Rhodes has learned to put up with a lot from the folks of Blacklin County, Texas; not to mention the barrage of teasing and gossip he gets from his dispatcher, Hack, and his jailer, Lawton. Rhodes handles everything with a cool head and a good bit of compassion. Although, Rhodes is not what you would imagine when you think of a Texas sheriff. He doesn't wear a cowboy hat or boots; there isn't a six shooter strapped to his hip. In fact, he prefers the Kel-Tec he keeps in his ankle holster.
Rhodes is a very logical and methodical investigator, so when Hack calls him in the middle of the night to back up Deputy Ruth Grady who is on a "shots fired" call at the local haunted house, Rhodes doesn't give it a second thought. After sloshing through the rain to the back of the house, he and Ruth find Neil Foshee, local meth dealer, face-down in one of the rooms. A cursory search doesn't turn up much else. The suspect list includes Neil's former girlfriend, Vicki, who happens to be friends with Rhodes's wife. There is also the nephew of Clearview's mayor, as well as Neil's partners in crime, his cousins Earl and Louie.
Complicating his investigation is the fact that the house is said to be haunted. The former owner--a man named Moore who also taught at the local high school--died in the house of a heart attack nearly forty years ago. (The house has remained empty since the owner's death; with only local drug dealers and vandals daring to venture inside.) By all accounts Moore was a bully of a teacher and he would use a BB gun to kill any animals that came onto his property. Rhodes doesn't believe in ghosts, but his "friend" Seepy Benton, the community college math professor who fancies himself an unofficial investigator for the sheriff's department, does. Though Rhodes himself has had some creepy feelings of being watched while visiting the house, Rhodes is still a skeptic.
Many folks--Hack and Lawton included--believe that the ghost has something to do with Neil's death. After the scene of Neil's death has been cleared, Benton wants Sheriff Rhodes to let them investigate the house. Knowing he won't have any peace until he lets the professor look around, Rhodes takes Benton and his partner through the house and they find a skeleton in a closet in the attic--a room Rhodes neglected to clear the night of the murder. Whoever the woman was--Benton can tell from the shape of the pelvic bones--Rhodes can see from the skull fracture that she must have been murdered or at least fallen and hit her head on something hard. But then, how did she get into the closet in the attic where she was found?
On top of these two bodies, Rhodes has to deal with copper thieves, a runaway bull, a county commissioner who wants to arm the sheriff's department for WWIII, and the rest of the characters that occupy Blacklin County. What is a small town sheriff to do?
