When a deranged young man, toting a gun and claiming to be a hundred years old, shows up at Fever Devilin's Blue Ridge Mountain cabin, the introspective folklorist offers him a seat?before calling his buddy, the sheriff. But the vagrant vanishes before the law arrives, only to turn up dead the next morning. Surprisingly, when Fever arrives to identify the body, it is not his ranting visitor -- but a stranger wearing the man's clothes.
Intrigued by the drifter and his strange stories of World War I, tango lessons and fratricide, Fever begins to investigate. Who is the dead man in borrowed clothes, and where is the stranger who waxed poetic on his couch? And where among them is the killer? The truth is as strange as the stories and legends that pervade the hills of Appalachia -- haunting and sometimes dangerous.