Grave robbers looking for jewels while breaking into mausoleums in a 200-year-old cemetery stumble onto the remains of a body that shouldn't be there: a teenaged girl. They take off, leaving the door to the mausoleum open. The cemetery night watchman finds the body and calls the police who in turn call Del Coltrane, the 33-year-old funeral director of Henderson's Funeral Home. Although Del isn't used to murder, he's used to death, so initially this is just another corpse. But after the victim is identified as a local teen long thought to be a runaway, Del is pulled into the case as a favor to the tough-as-nails 15-year-old niece of the dead girl. Gradually he realizes a serial killer has been preying on the women in his town for 20 years.