For a smart, beautiful young woman, Laura Milton has some very real problems.
First of all, she can see ghosts. Even as a child growing up in Dallas, Texas she shared her beloved mother’s gift of second sight. But after losing both of her parents early on, Laura has grown into a melancholy and intense young woman. And with a laundry list of other ailments, her psychic gift has become more of a burden than anything else…
Diagnosed epileptic at 21, she has been told to live a calm life to help keep the seizures at bay. Unfortunately, when you are in graduate school and forced to deal with the undead on a daily basis, life is anything but calm. Her only comforts are her schoolwork and Colin Jonah, a young budding scientist and close family friend. Since college, their friendship has grown much more intimate. And even though they have separated, Laura can’t imagine ever living without him.
But now, at 24, Laura’s life is once again on the rocks. As a young girl, Laura saw the infamous White Rock Lady, a female ghost that has supposedly haunted the lake in Dallas since 1933. Ever since then, she has been plagued with violent reoccurring nightmares that have affected her entire life; slowly alienating her from Colin, isolating her from her friends, and playing havoc with her sanity. Under the premise of doing graduate research, she returns to her hometown to finally seek the truth behind the White Rock legend and hopefully put an end to her terrifying dreams.
But Dallas turns out to be a very different place than she remembers. Laura meets the handsome and mysterious Mallory, a hotel entrepreneur who introduces her to a darker, more sensual side of southern hospitality. She interviews some colorful characters who impart stories of a dark past that include the JFK assassination, illegal gambling rings, exclusive orgies, and gangland-style massacres that have all been meticulously covered up through the decades.
The name Rose Davis keeps appearing in her research, the daughter of mentally ill heiress from Houston and her reclusive husband, who lived on the lake in the 1960’s. Could this young girl be the elusive White Rock Lady? And as we watch the young Rose care for her alcoholic mother and yearn to escape the horror of her life, we also follow Laura’s modern-day investigation that takes her from famed dilapidated nightclubs to abandoned Texas warehouses in search of the identity of a ghost that is very much a part of her, more so than she could ever imagine. But now, there are people following her who will stop at nothing to keep the identity of the ghost a mystery…