Stranger are the creatures in the dark mind of man than in the deepest, darkest forest . . . Joe Frye, the only female detective in the Miami PD's Homicide division, has a secret. Not even her lover, detective Louis Kincaid, knows of the events in Joe's past which still haunt her to this day. It all began eleven years ago, when Joe was an ambitious rookie cop in a small Michigan town called Echo Bay . . . The bones found in the woods of Echo Bay were the first clue to a string of unimaginably brutal murders of young women. Plunged into a heated inquiry to find a dangerous predator, and caught between a reluctant sheriff and the state police, Joe finds herself battling both the killer and the bureaucracy suffocating the investigation. But the clues she uncovers indicate that the murderer has a mind more twisted than any of them could have imagined. Worse still, his sights are now firmly fixed on Joe, and she must hunt him down if she is to avoid becoming his next victim...