Pendergast

In the space of six months, FBI Special Agent Dwight Chambers loses his partner and then his wife. When he returns to work at the New Orleans Field Office, still struggling to hold himself together, he is told to mentor a brand new agent named A. X. L. Pendergast. Pendergast turns out to be enigmatic and exasperating, and an outrageous stunt of his gets both men suspended.

Pendergast is glad of the enforced break. It frees him to look into a peculiar murder in Mississippi that has caught his interest, and Chambers reluctantly tags along. What seems at first like a whimsical side quest soon becomes a frightening pursuit. The two men find a series of grisly, ritualistic killings that do not fit any known serial killer profile.

Pendergast's brilliance and unorthodox methods help them solve the case and identify the killer. That, however, is only where the real horror begins.