''People don''t like dealing with people who raise the dead. Don''t ask me why, but we make them nervous.''

There''s something about Leo Harlan that I don''t like. He''s asked me to reanimate his long-dead ancestor, and it seems like a perfectly ordinary case for someone like me: Anita Blake, preternatural expert, vampire hunter and raiser of the dead. So I agree - sometimes you deal with the devil not because you want to, but because if you don''t, someone else will.

But what he hasn''t told me is that the corpse may hold the secret to an ancient crime that not everyone wants to be remembered.