When a shyster New Orleans lawyer obtains acquittals for ruthless killers, mysterious forces seem to be at play as one after another, the suspects meet their own violent but unexplained deaths in a sudden series of bizarre "accidents" until the attorney himself becomes an apparent target. Matt Ramsey is a law clerk whose hobby it is to peruse the police beat stories in the local New Orleans newspaper. His curiosity pulls him into a web of intrigue that places his life as well as those of his girlfriend and her grandmother in imminent danger as shady figures in the Crescent City's legal netherworld, set out to silence them in order to protect their illegal enterprises.