Between the gentle trade winds and the thriving tourist trade, the year-round summer days and the languid nights, the living is easy in Key West. That's just the way P.I. Gideon Lowry likes it.

These days, when he's not bird-dogging AWOL witnesses for the state attorney's office, Gideon's at the keyboard, giving them Gershwin and Porter to chase away the blues and help chase down the booze.

That's where Virginia Murphy finds him. Shrouded in somber white, she's come back to Key West to lay a real ghost to rest - by finding out who murdered her sister, Lila, nearly 40 years before.

For Gideon, it's a gig that leads him down the darker side of memory lane - where haunting snatches of his own past, like the timeless melodies he plays, linger on. Secrets linger there, too. But they're buried as deeply as the paradise that was Florida's landscape, now entombed beneath the concrete of Bayard Cement. That ubiquitous family business - and the wealthy, influential clan behind it - are a wall that Gideon slams up against harder and harder as he investigates his hometown's hidden history.

That's when Gideon takes the pledge - to unlock the shocking truth that Key West has concealed too long beneath its sunny, sultry surface, and to face a killer's music and dance.