Dallas ex-cop Charlie Gants thinks there is nothing in this world for him to look forward to—except, maybe, more nightmares. He is about to leave the mental hospital where he has spent the past three months recovering—he hopes—from an explosion of murder that involved the deaths of two of his fellow policemen in a devastatingly dirty way. But shortly before his release, he is talked into accepting a fortuitous job offer—traveling to the cattle ranch of a family named McKendrick to try and find why—if there is a why—the family has been cursed with a series of serious and sometimes fatal accidents. The atmosphere is a strange one. It is possible that there is actually an Indian curse on the land—the Shaman Tree? It stands on the shore of the lake where a McKendrick daughter recently drowned. Is the old Indian Gants encounters there alive, or is he a figure in a dream, or possibly a figment in a flashback from the drugs forced on Gants at a time of the double killing that scrambled his psyche? One death follows another as Gants tries to find and foil a killer, deals with the otherworldly aura that hangs over the McKendrick land and its ominous great tree, and grimly fights to avoid being plunged back into the horror he has fought for so long.