Suspense fiction. It started with a letter, in the handwriting of a child - '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, a precocious eleven-year-old daughter. No-one Karen knows has been kidnapped. If the police are powerless, is it her responsibility? The letters keep coming. Then far, far worse. Because there is a child out there. It started in an old Mormon mining town, with a history darkly hidden. A fool leaves his young daughters alone in a rotting trailer park. He returns to find one of them gone, the other seeping blood into thin carpet, brains bulging through the hole in her head. 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 a little mute girl with ghastly, formless nightmares. Secretly, Ella suspects the worst, that God is abandoning them all. Because there is a serial killer. And he isn't going to stop. It started in the Canyonlands with a violent cult, a depraved monstrousness unleashed upon the innocent and the misled. Now, the last survivor has a story to tell and Karen Wiley is coerced into the unforgiving desert wilderness by a deadly game disguised as a righteous quest for the truth.