When FBI Special Agent Clare Marshall was 5 years old her mother shot her 7yr old brother in the head and then pointed the gun and shot Clare before police broke in and stopped her from shooting her infant sister. When Clare awoke in the hospital is was to find out her brother was dead and that her baby sister was already adopted out. Now 25 years later her mother is finally being put to death. This causes Clare to have a panic attack remembering what happened 25 years ago and as she is trying to get through the panic attack in the alley she stumbles upon a robbery/hostage situation. She takes out the drugged out robber before he can kill the hostage. The woman she manages to save happens to work in social services and wants to repay Clare for saving her life and gives Clare the name and town that her sister has been living in. Clare who doesn’t trust easily and has had so many dead ends in her search for her sister can hardly believe it. But after running her DMV picture she realizes it is.

Clare then takes 2 weeks of vacation to go the little town of Farley, SC in search of her sister. But what she finds when she gets there is her sister is missing on no one seems to care and most are downright hostile to her. After finding Beth's adoptive mother in a nursing home and talking to her on her way out she runs into fellow FBI Special Agent Jake Sutton who she used to work with in New York and also was in a relationship with. Jake walked away 3 years ago from Clare and never contacted her again.

Throughout the story we find out what went wrong in Jack and Clare's relationship and why he ended up giving up a prestige job in Washington to take a job in a small FBI office in GA.

We are also lead on the journey to find Clare's sister. So many suspects but they can’t find any real proof. It isn’t until they stumble upon a disappearance of another woman 4 years before that things start coming together but as they get closer Clare's life is threatened more than once until she come face to face with a killer.
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