I've seen pictures of guys like this, snipers or SWAT guys or whatever. Never expected to see one of them in my own house, a living nightmare perched on my favorite chair.

No parent believes it can happen to them -- their child taken from a suburban schoolyard in the gentle hours of dusk. But as widowed mother Kate Bickford discovers, everything can change in the blink of an eye. One minute her lanky, amazing, maddening Tommy is begging for ice cream. Then in a terrible instant, he's gone.

Opening the door to her Connecticut home, hoping to find her son, Kate comes face-to-face with her son's abductor. He wants money. All she has. And if she doesn't follow something he calls The Method, the consequences will be gruesome.

Her comfortable life collapses as precious seconds tick by, and Kate is horrified to uncover the terrible, world-shattering secret she and her son share with a killer who will stop at nothing . . .