In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constables girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos Countyto Boston, to southern Vermont, to Torontopursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.

The author of the Charlie Parker mysteries heads off in a different direction in his new novel. The small island of Sanctuary, off the coast of Maine, was once the scene of a bloody massacre. Now, three centuries later, evil has again come to the island, a modern-day evil with strange, eerie connections to the events of the late 1600s. Do two police officers have even a remote chance of stopping the carnage?

Daniel Clay, a once-respected psychiatrist, has gone missing. His daughter insists that he killed himself. A killer obsessed with finding the truth about his own daughter's disappearance is seeking revenge. A trap is set between those who want the truth about Clay to be revealed, and those who will go to any length -no matter the cost- to keep it hidden.

Stripped of his private investigator's license and supervised by the police, Charlie Parker works in a bar in Portland and apparently has a peaceful life. However, he is still overwhelmed with some episodes of his past, in particular the circumstances in which his father dies, Will Parker. Charlie Parker decides to find out exactly what happened, he will have to turn his eyes into his past, even if that means discovering uncomfortable truths and lies committed.