No one out-suffers Mrs. Grace Geneva - not lepers, or pilgrims, and certainly not the poor excuse for sickly in little Carpenter, NC. That the top of the prayer list is no longer Mrs. Grace purview upsets her to no end, and when a string of suspicious deaths dispatch the competition, the old girl connives to keep the murders unsolved. She knows how, too, since the local coroner is a hopeless, hapless, and hexed mama's boy who will never amount to anything. Just how Mrs. Grace raised him. Bless his heart.