 Diminutive Private eye, Mongo "The Magnificent", is asked to investigate the secretive a Nobel Prize winner s strange work with sensory deprivation and a murder case involving a jailed psychic healer. Then, Kathy Marlowe, his seven-year-old neighbor, gives him her life s savings---57 cents---to find her father s new book called "The Book of Shadows," Within hours, Mongo finds Kathy s father ritually murdered in a circle of greenish-white fire and the little girl in a deep coma that medical experts can t break. Mongo s only clue: the mysterious gown, covered with occult symbols, that Kathy was wearing when Mongo discovered her. Searching desperately for the cause of Kathy s coma with his policeman brother, Garth, Mongo discovers to his horror that Kathy has become a helpless pawn in a deadly affair of sorcerers. With Kathy s mother, a beautiful witch with whom he falls love, Mongo penetrates the mushrooming world of the occult underground and encounters powerful, dark forces that threaten his own life as well as Kathy s. Racing against time in a terrifying quest that takes him from the Cloisters of Brooklyn, Mongo uses every trick he knows to discover the significance of the Book of Shadows and the identity of "Esobus," the legendary sorcerer who leads a murderous super-coven of witches. In a final, apocalyptic confrontation with the powerful sorcerer, Mongo learns the ultimate truth about witchcraft---and himself.