Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings and in doing so damned himself. His life was torn apart. He was imprisoned, brutalised. But in his final days, with the hunters circling, he tells his story to private detective Charlie Parker, speaking of the girl who was marked for death, but was saved; of the ones who tormented him, and an entity that hides in a ruined stockade. Parker is not like other men. He died, and...

Recovering from a near-fatal shooting and tormented by memories of a world beyond this one, Parker has retreated to the small Maine town of Boreas to recover. There he befriends a widow named Ruth Winter and her young daughter, Amanda. But Ruth has her secrets. She is hiding from the past, and the forces that threaten her have their origins in the Second World War, in a town called Lubko and a concentration camp unlike any other.

The brutal murder of the Reverend George Parker in the rural village of Oddingley on Midsummer's Day in 1806 gripped everyone from the Home Secretary in London to newspapermen across the country. This is a nail-biting true story of brutality, greed and ruthlessness which brings an elusive society vividly back to life.