Backwoods treachery links a string of grisly Minnesota murders.

Reporter Paul Cavanaugh is coming home from an afternoon tennis match when he sees an ambulance outside his building's door. A half hour earlier, the mild-mannered Larry Blankenship walked into the lobby, said hello to the doorman, and blew his brains out in front of the elevator bank, leaving behind a note apologizing for the mess. Cavanaugh retreats to his apartment to forget this disturbing scene, thinking the story is over when the police take away the body. But the suicide is only the beginning. A knot of death is tied tight around Blankenship's wife, Kim, an ice-cold beauty from the backwoods of northern Minnesota. As he investigates the string of deaths, Cavanaugh discovers a decades-old atrocity that may explain why the men who know Kim vanish faster than a sunny day in Minneapolis.