Welcome to North Falls—a small town where everyone knows everyone. Or so they think. Until the night of the fireworks. When two teenage girls vanish, and the town ignites. For Officer Emmy Clifton, it’s personal. She turned away when her best friend's daughter needed help—and now she must bring her home. But as Emmy combs through the puzzle the girls left behind, she realizes she never really knew them. Nobody did. Every teenage girl has secrets. But who would kill for them? And what else is the town hiding?

Colter Shaw is a career "reward-seeker", making his living traveling the country and locating missing persons, collecting reward money in return. So it is not unusual when a wealthy entrepreneur hires him to track down his wife, an enigmatic artist who vanished one month before. As Shaw begins to investigate, he suspects that she was fleeing a bad marriage, and he follows her trail to an artists' retreat in Indiana. The case takes one surprising turn after another, and soon, Shaw begins to wonder if this mysterious woman is more of a captor than a captive.

Eccentric, reclusive Walter Rennert lies cold at the bottom of his stairs. At first glance the scene looks straightforward: a once-respected psychology professor done in by booze and a bad heart. But his daughter, Tatiana, insists that her father has been murdered, and she persuades Clay Edison to take a closer look at the grim facts of Rennert's life. What emerges is a history of scandal and violence and an experiment gone horribly wrong that ended in the brutal murder of a coed.

Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences. Elisabetta is a feisty beauty who dreams of becoming a novelist; Marco the brash and athletic son in a family of professional cyclists; and Sandro a Jewish mathematics prodigy, kind-hearted and thoughtful, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. Their friendship blossoms to love, with both Sandro and Marco hoping to win Elisabetta's heart.

Former spy Maggie Bird came to the seaside village of Purity, Maine, eager to put the past behind her after a mission went tragically wrong. These days, she’s living quietly on her chicken farm, still wary of blowback from the events that forced her early retirement. But when a body turns up in Maggie’s driveway, she knows it’s a message from former foes who haven’t forgotten her. Maggie turns to her local circle of old friends—all retirees from the CIA—to help uncover the truth about who is trying to kill her, and why.