In South Carolina, a young black man faces the death penalty for the rape and murder of Marianne Larousse, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the state. It's a case that 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, a red dreamscape haunted by the murderous spectre of a hooded woman, by a black car waiting for a passenger that never comes, and by the complicity of both friends and enemies in the events surrounding Marianne Larousse's death. This is not a simple investigation. It is a descent into the abyss, a confrontation with dark forces that threaten all that Parker holds dear: his lover, his unborn child, even his soul.

For in a prison cell far to the north in Maine, the fanatical preacher Faulkner is about to take his revenge on Charlie Parker, its instruments the very men that Parker is hunting, and a strange, hunched creature that keeps its own secret buried by a riverbank: the undiscovered killer, Cyrus Nairn. Soon, all of these figures will face a final reckoning in southern swamps and northern forests, in distant locations linked by a single thread, a place where the paths of the living and the dead converge. A place known only as the White Road.

This is the fourth book in Dubliner John Connolly's horror series.