A chance encounter with a wealthy congressman leads to an unusual proposition... When belly dancer and amateur sleuth Jeanne Pelletier meets a wealthy conservative congressman at a Halloween party, neither is in a festive mood. Jeanne is cash-strapped, brooding over her disastrous love life, and rattled by a pair of invitations that remind her of the life she thought she had left behind. Congressman Richardson is worried about the mental stability of his wife, a beauty queen-turned-historian who claims to be terrorized by a vindictive two-hundred-year-old ghost. Before their dance is over, Jeanne agrees to investigate who-or what-is behind his wife's "haunting." But when Jeanne finds a body draped over a Confederate spy's tomb near the Richardsons' Georgetown mansion, she begins to suspect that the "haunting" has escalated to murder-and that her clients may be involved. Wracked by guilt and determined to discover his killer, Jeanne enlists the aid of her grumpy ex-CIA agent neighbor and an ex-con would-be Latin lover. But as they dig deeper into the Richardsons' sordid past, Jeanne is also forced to grapple with her own.