Ken H. Fortenberry’s Edisto Blood Oath is a taut, fast-paced mystery steeped in the tragic history of the ancient island town at the southern end of the South Carolina coast, a place where the ghosts of slaves, masters and their descendants ride the marsh gases and call out to the living.

Jack Edings, the sole heir of plantation owners who settled on Edisto Island more than three centuries ago, hears that spectral summons, haunted by the insistent voice commanding him to return to the home of his ancestors because someone unnamed needs his help.

His grandmother’s death hastens his homecoming to the seaside plantation house where he spent the summers of his youth, setting him on a collision course with his own ghosts — and the very real threat of dope smugglers who want to kill Jack just for asking questions they don’t want answered.

The author deftly choreographs a deadly dance between Jack’s living enemies, chiefly a crooked police chief, his money-grubbing wife and a bent county coroner, and his memories, including the unsolved mystery of shots in the dark that punctuated a smuggling run Jack and a boyhood friend witnessed a decade ago.

Jack and friend take a blood oath, hiding the blade both used under a plank in the basement stairwell of his grandmother’s home. That teenage bond is soon shattered by the friend’s tragic death, ruled the result of a car striking him as he walked along a darkened road at night. The truth is murder.

Turns out, the friend, Robert Mikell “Mike” Jenkins IV, was the only son of the police chief who now wants to snuff out Jack’s candle. Faulkner was right: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Jack isn’t alone as he foxtrots with the past and present. Early on, he recruits Nathaniel Hutchinson — Hutch to his friends — the grandson of James Ezekiel “Po’boy” Hutchinson, a day laborer at a seafood joint who disappears one night close to the time of the smuggling and shooting. They also corral a retired reporter named Anna, a woman with big city chops who believes in her new partners.

While maintaining a brisk tempo as Jack and Hutch try to smoke out the killers who are stalking them, the author makes judicious use of Edisto’s rich and bloody history, including the sly use of the Hutchinson name.

This is a nod to Jim Hutchinson, a politically active freeman who organized other ex-slaves into co-ops to buy land once owned by plantation masters only to be murdered in 1885 by a white man acquitted on appeal by an all-white jury as Jim Crow laws were enacted across the South, reinforcing white supremacy and snuffing out the promise of Reconstruction.

These nods and nuggets aren’t distractions. And that’s a good thing because this book has more twists and turns than a tidal creek meandering through the marshes of Edisto Island. Pay attention, reader. You’ll be glad you did.

— Jim Nesbitt is the award-winning author of five hard-boiled Texas crime thrillers that feature Ed Earl Burch, a battered but relentless Dallas P.I. and cashiered homicide detective.