Ma Smith and the He-Man Woman Haters is about murder, disappearances, a ghost, psychic revelations, a curse, and even a little about God and human relationships. At the center of this confusion is Ma Smith, a cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking woman who exerts quiet control over those around her. Her nemesis is a self-ordained minister who takes an old barnCa barn with a curseCand turns it into a church. The misogynist who built the barn left a curse on any woman who came near it. Local tradition has it that women have mysteriously disappeared around it since that time. Now, with the disappearance of the town's only policewoman, it seems that the old curse has revisited the community. When a friend of Ma Smith, Bitsy Ritz, in her last days of pregnancy, disappears, tension builds and the old mystery becomes personal.
