Footprints were scattered about like fallen leaves. She looked down into the ravine, and once more her lungs filled with fear. A body lay silent and unmoving in the bushes.

When Ruth Turner walks into the Sheriff’s office in Jefferson County’s Port Townsend claiming her sister Ida Wheaton has been missing for over a month, Detective Megan Carpenter’s instincts tell her that she needs to do more than just file a report.

Racing over to Ida’s secluded farmhouse in the hills above Snow Creek, Megan finds Ida’s teenage children alone and frightened. She can’t help but notice there’s no TV. No video games. Nothing of the outside world. Something about the Wheaton family doesn’t add up and triggers a painful childhood memory for Megan – when one day, in a flash, both her parents were gone.

Then the body of a woman is discovered in an abandoned pickup truck close to the Wheatons’ home and Megan’s convinced the cases are connected.

If she has any chance of catching the killer, Megan must first unravel the secrets of the isolated Snow Creek community. But Megan has dark secrets of her own…

Hidden in the back of her closet is a box of tapes containing every single recording of her therapy sessions over thirteen years ago. Can she finally confront the past she’s spent years trying to block out? And will reliving her own painful story help her solve the complex case unravelling in the hills above Snow Creek before another innocent life is lost?

From the Number One, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Amazon Chart bestselling author comes an absolutely heart-stopping and completely unputdownable crime series, introducing Detective Megan Carpenter.