Star crime journalist Regan Landry has long struggled to emerge from the shadow of her literary-legend father. Now she's onto the story of a lifetime: a convicted rapist-murderer freed from death row hours before his execution. Lester Ray Barnes had maintained his innocence from the very beginning—but a week after speaking to Regan, he mysteriously vanishes ... and soon afterward, young women start turning up dead on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Is it coincidence, or merely the next chapter in a grisly saga that should have ended in the death chamber? Tracking a trail of chilling clues, Regan and FBI special agent Mitch Peyton must confront the horrifying possibility that they have helped to free a cunning monster with an insatiable appetite for death—and a ruthless determination never to be caged again.