A sought-after expert in criminal pathology, Dr. Charlotte Stone regularly sits face-to-face with madmen. Obsessed with learning what makes human monsters commit terrible crimes, Charlie desires little else from life--no doubt because when she was sixteen, she herself survived a serial killer's bloodbath: A man butchered the family of Charlie's best friend, Holly, then left the girl's body on a seaside boardwalk one week later. Now FBI agent Tony Bartoli is telling Charlie that a teenage girl is missing, her family slaughtered. Bartoli suspects that after fifteen years, the killer is back. This is the one case Charlie shouldn't go near. But she also knows that she may be the one person in the world who can stop this vicious killer.