An unsolved twenty-year-old murder attracts the attention of Finn Ryan, a horror novelist with a guilty secret, and Warren Yost, a Newton, MA, police detective on the eve of retirement. When Finn is drawn into a steamy love affair with Tally Serzak, another author with secrets of her own, he realizes too late that in one of her books she’s handed him a map to her doom. Because in it are details pointing to Tally as the perpetrator of the decades-old crime. As Yost moves ever closer to solving the case and arresting Tally, Finn is torn between his love for the duplicitous author and his fear of her. For she knows his secret now, and with it can destroy him, as he can destroy her. Only at the last minute does he recognize a clue in a crime-scene photo of the old murder. A clue that may spell death for both of them.