The setting is Miami. Rookie cop Tito Morales arrives at the Trianon hotel to investigate a routine disturbance call and, to his shock and horror, watches as a wealthy oil man plunges ten stories and impales himself on a nearby fence. Soon Morales is joined by detective Jimmy Paz, famous throughout the city for solving -- or at least providing a plausible solution to -- the so-called Voodoo Murders that left Miami burning months earlier.

Together Paz and Morales enter the hotel and discover in the dead man's room a most unusual suspect, an otherworldly woman by the name of Emmylou Dideroff. She emerges from a prayerlike state and says she wants to confess and asks for a pen and several notebooks.

What Emmylou writes is nothing like what Paz expects; he enlists psychologist Lorna Wise in an effort to make sense of things that go beyond Emmylou's explanation of the murder: details of childhood abuse, of other crimes committed, of regular communion with saints -- and with the devil. Is she mentally disturbed? Does she really believe herself to be an instrument of God? And why is it that so many people -- including Paz's biological father -- are suddenly interested in the contents of these notebooks and in preventing them from becoming public?

Emmylou's "confession" leads Jimmy Paz, Lorna Wise, and Tito Morales down a series of unexpected and dangerous turns that forces them each to confront questions about faith, love, and the possibility of the miraculous.