Nick Cade and his sister, Wendy, are killing time at the Palmetto Island dock while their parents attend a business dinner when a long-missing woman’s animated corpse — in other words, a zombie — drags away the canoe his sister is sitting in and disappears into the mist. When their parents learn she’s missing, they’re angry the pair didn’t stay put in the condo as instructed, and Officer McDonald thinks Wendy ran off to meet up with friends, even though she and Nick don’t know anyone on the island.

With the help of an island girl named Kat who speaks in a strange accent — “she had a funny way of making words interesting” — Nick visits a Gullah woman called Poke Salad Annie for help and plumbs the depths of Palmetto Island, but the real revelations come when an old case of Nick’s comes back from the dead.

Zane Van Wicklyn is a scarily talented young man whose voice, diction, and interpretation are well beyond his youthful years. He’s an inimitable narrator and fully brings Nick to life while also doing justice to the female voices of the story. This is an audiobook to enjoy over and over just to hear Zane’s delivery.