Special Agent Sadie Price, a 29-year-old rising star in the FBI's BAU unit, stuns her colleagues by requesting reassignment to the FBI's remote Alaskan field office. Back in her home state, a place she vowed she would never return, Sadie, running from a secret in her recent past and back into her old one, finds herself facing her demons—including her sister's unsolved murder—while assigned to hunt down a new serial killer.
When a young woman is found mauled by a bear—the second case in one week—the authorities chalk it up to a desperate animal, driven by hunger to attack. Nature, as far as the locals are concerned, can be as cruel a killer as any murderer. But Sadie isn't convinced. She suspects a serial killer, and when she realizes both victims were young women living alone in cabins, she takes it upon herself to visit a string of isolated, desolate cabins in the wilderness, including one with particular significance—her father's. When a third woman is found, Sadie knows she is the only thing standing between this diabolical killer and his innocent, next victim.
But in the forbidding wilderness, in the thick of winter, can Sadie reach the woman before it's too late? And can she stop this killer all while unearthing the ghosts of her own family's past?