Seventeen-year-old Nev has done everything she was supposed to since she was emancipated and left the group home a year ago. Build a routine. Work hard. And learn to forget all the missing girls she left behind.

But when a man connected to her old group home turns up dead a few blocks from her apartment, Nev is sure it’s connected. She drives back to Avan Island, the small Maryland town known only for all the girls who went missing.

When she arrives, she expects to be alone in a town of smiling churchgoers and surrounded by a looming forest that seems to whisper to Nev. Or maybe that’s just the PTSD her social worker kept talking about. Instead, she is met with familiar faces—other girls who had lived in the group home, and the men who ran the home, who are going missing and turning up dead, one by one.

As Nev is pulled deeper into Avan’s secrets—and more bodies pile up—Nev must unravel the mysteries locked in her own mind as they hunt down a killer who is willing to do anything to make sure the past stays buried.