The rich history of Florida's Tango Key provides a lush and evocative backdrop to a story that begins with the discovery of a body in a house in the center of a mango grove. It's that of Lou Hernando, and the chief suspect is his seventeen-year-old sidekick Ross Blade, a refugee from a troubled family, who'd found a real home with Lou in the cliffside house, a repository of secrets from a time when pirates roamed the nearby waters.

Quin and Mike, old friends of Hernando's, soon find that this stone-and-wood outpost is full of more than the possible identity of Lou's killer. Every major event there is accompanied by unexplained rustlings and a faint scent of jasmine. Their investigation into Lou's recent life turns up a trail of disgruntled women: his ex-wife, his business partner, a local reader of tarot cards.

But as St. James and McCleary home in on the possible suspects in the crime, they begin to realize that the true object of Lou's erotic obsessions was a woman whose image adorns the main room of the Hernando family homestead: the mistress of the bones, Luz, a former slave who'd been brought to Tango Key from Cuba. Only by delving into this mysterious woman's history can the identity of Lou's killer be found.