Trying to escape an abusive marriage, Audra and her children are fleeing through Arizona on their way to California. When she's pulled over by a local sheriff, things soon go awry and she is taken into custody, but her kids aren't brought to the station. Worse, the cops start say they never saw anyone with her, that if they're gone then she must have done something with them. In this novel by Stuart Neville (writing as Haylen Beck), a man halfway across the country hears the frenzied news reports about the missing children, which are eerily similar to events in his own past, and he too is drawn into the desperate fight for their return.