FBI contractor Jake Cole deciphers the language of murderers by reconstructing three-dimensional crime scene models in his head, a talent that has left his nerves frayed and his psyche fragile. Jake returns to Montauk for the first time in a quarter of a century when his father, a renowned painter, lights himself ablaze and crashes through a plate-glass window. Once home, Jake is pulled into a gruesome local homicide investigation that echoes his mother's murder three decades earlier. As he sifts through the detritus of his father's madness, Jake discovers thousands of seemingly meaningless paintings stacked in the studio - a bizarre trail of dust-covered breadcrumbs the painter left as he tumbled down the rabbit hole of dementia - breadcrumbs that Jake believes lead to the killer. With the help of Sheriff Dan Hauser - a man scrambling to prepare the seaside community for the arrival of a catastrophic hurricane - Jake Cole sets out to find the seemingly unstoppable force of malevolence known as the Bloodman.