New York Times bestselling author John Connolly brings his “visionary brand of neo-noir” (The Irish Times) to this “riveting and chilling” (San Francisco Examiner) thriller in the Charlie Parker series about buried secrets and haunted lives.

There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud. Here is one of those truths: after three hours, the abduction of a child is routinely treated as a homicide.

When a girl goes missing from a small Maine town, her neighbor—a recluse named Randall Haight—begins receiving anonymous letters referencing a different teenage girl, murdered years ago. Unknown to many, Randall has been hiding a secret: at fourteen, he was convicted of killing that girl. Now, his past resurfaces, and he hires private detective Charlie Parker to make the torment stop.

But in a town built on blood and shadowed by old ghosts, where too many of the living are hiding secrets, the past cannot be dismissed so easily. As Parker unravels a twisted, violent history involving a doomed mobster and his enemies, the police, and the FBI, his search returns again and again to Randall Haight. Because Randall is still telling lies…