It started with a child's letter. O God help me he's going to hurt me if you don't do what he says. Karen Wiley, recently qualified San Francisco psychologist, thought she understood moral dilemma. A tormented past, a sister lost in childhood to random atrocity, an ugly divorce and a precocious eleven-year-old daughter. He says he's going to hurt me. No one Karen knows has been kidnapped. If the police are powerless, is it her responsibility? But the letters keep coming. Then something far worse. In an old Mormon mining town, with a dark history, a man leaves his young daughters alone in a rotting trailer park. He returns to find one of them gone, the other barely breathing and seeping blood into thin carpet. He knows where you are now. I had to give it to him.Ella McCullers, first female Police Chief of Canaan, Utah, believed she knew crises of faith. Abruptly promoted to lead investigator in the state's most high-profile kidnapping case, her only leads are a decaying tombstone, a butchered cat, and the now mute sister who has ghastly, formless nightmares. Secretly, Ella suspects that God is abandoning them all.