Michael Dubose, tortured by recurring dreams and a hatred for his mother, is a force not to be denied.

As Mardi Gras begins in the French Quarter, Dubose's time has come. Driven by loathing, Michael seeks deliverance from his pain. Five women must die so he can live free.

Along with his roommate Billy, Michael devises a grandiose plan to end two lives—his mother and her maid—in the cathedral where he had been forced every Sunday of his youth to kneel and pay homage to a God that was just as unlovely as his mother.

But three other women of pain must also die—Sister Monica, the lady in black and white who had belittled and berated him because he stuttered; Olivia Pressley, the girl he had thought was his friend until she turned on him his freshman year of high school; and Martha Cravens, a boss who considered him slow, dull, and bumbling—and who was also an older, heavier version of his mother.

As innocent people begin paying the price for Michael's twisted plan, the New Orleans police hope for a miracle to save the French Quarter and its visitors as semantics and subtleties ravage a killer's sick mind.