Fifteen years after helping to send rapist Frank Ventresca to prison, guidance counsellor Samantha Quinlan has a nearly perfect life: a job she loves, a boyfriend she loves, and a son she loves even more. But when Frank turns up again — still obsessing, still delusional, and still dangerous — Samantha’s nightmare begins all over again.
Wherever she goes, Frank lurks, and the life Samantha has struggled to build comes dangerously close to unravelling. She is implicated in the dismissal of a colleague. One of her beloved students dies. Samantha discovers her son might not be the perfect child she has been so proud of. And a romantic getaway with her fiancé, a prominent Boston surgeon, ends in violence. As Samantha struggles to cope with each new crisis, she begins to wonder: Are the events connected?
As the knot of menace tightens around her, Samantha realizes that madness often wears a disguise.