It was a town legend: a teenage girl who disappeared; the bloody dress found in the woods; the local man who, beaten down, confessed to the crime; and the mother who forever searched for her daughter's body. Jackson Kinley grew up on that legend before he moved to New York to become a true-crime writer - and he finds it waiting for him when he returns to bury his old friend, law officer Ray Tindall. That murder had occupied Ray's last weeks, and what Kinley discovers, poking through the same ashes, will change his life...