Mara Ellison has spent her adult life proving that blood does not decide who a person becomes. Years ago, her father was convicted as the monster behind a string of disappearances in Cypress Hollow, leaving Mara to grow up beneath a name everyone remembers and questions no one wants to ask. Now she is a psychologist with a carefully controlled life, a man she loves, and every reason to keep the past buried. Then young women begin vanishing again. The timing is impossible to ignore, the details feel disturbingly familiar, and the town that once looked at Mara with pity starts looking at her with suspicion. As old case files resurface and a persistent reporter digs into the Ellison murders, Mara is forced back into the history she has tried to escape. Her fiancé Julian has secrets of his own, her family is more complicated than she wants to admit, and each new clue makes it harder to tell whether the present danger is copying the past or continuing it. Someone in Cypress Hollow knows far more about the original disappearances than they ever revealed. Someone is watching Mara's reactions closely. And the closer she gets to the truth, the more she must confront a terrifying possibility: the person she should fear most may not be the killer already behind bars. In a town built on buried evidence, damaged loyalties, and memories that refuse to stay silent, Mara must decide who she can trust before another woman disappears and her father's legacy claims one more life.
Mara Ellison has spent her adult life proving that blood does not decide who a person becomes. Years ago, her father was convicted as the monster behind a string of disappearances in Cypress Hollow, leaving Mara to grow up beneath a name everyone remembers and questions no one wants to ask. Now s...