When the two strangers turn up at Row ena Cooper's isolated Colorado farmhouse, she knows instantly that it's the end of everything. For the tw o haunted and driven men, on the other hand, it's just another stop on a long and bloody journey. And they still have many miles to go, and victims to sacrifice, before their w ork is done. §For San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart, their trail of corpses - women abducted, tortured and left w ith a seemingly random series of objects inside them - has brought her from obsession to the edge of physical and psychological destruction. And she's losing hope of making a breakthrough before that happens. §But the slaughter at the Cooper farmhouse didn't quite go according to plan. There was a survivor, Row ena's 10-year-old daughter Nell, who now holds the key to the killings. §Injured, half-frozen, terrified, Nell has only one place to go. And that place could be even more terrifying than w hat she's running from.