Ten years after a teenage girl's disappearance, a bizarre confession breaks open the cold case in dangerous ways…and threatens to tear apart her small Wisconsin town all over again in the masterfully twisty new psychological suspense novel from the internationally bestselling author of Twenty Years Later.

Joe works at a facility that performs human experimentation. His work just followed him home. The government wanted to unlock hidden abilities in the human mind. They put subjects in extreme sensory deprivation. All the test subjects went violently insane. But the research continued. Today it has been perfected. Almost perfected.

Kit Darling is a maid with a snooping problem. She’s the “invisible girl,” compelled to poke into her wealthy clients’ closely guarded lives. It’s a harmless hobby until Kit sees something she can’t unsee in the home of her brand-new clients: a secret so dark it could destroy the privileged couple expecting their first child. This makes Kit dangerous to the couple. In turn, it makes the couple—who might kill to keep their secret—dangerous to Kit.

Every day, Mary wakes up before dawn to make breakfast from scratch. She tends the garden and feeds the animals. Every night, Mary makes sure she has dinner on the table for when her husband Cal gets home from work. She puts on his favourite lipstick and greets him with a smile. 'I've missed you.' It's not true and he knows it. But he likes to hear it all the same. Their cabin is hidden deep in the woods in the Scottish Highlands, and Mary doesn't remember the last time she saw another living soul. She tries not to think about her life before too much.

It was summer in the mountains when five small children vanished from their nursery school picnic. The heat was stifling that day, the tinkle of an ice-cream van in the air.... Three-and-a-half years later, in the dead of winter, the children are returned to their families...one by one. All except for Ivy - the granddaughter of Homicide Detective Kate Wakeland. The other four children say Ivy is dead.