The body of Grace Peltier, a brilliant Ph.D. candidate, is found in the front seat of her car on a back road in northern Maine. No one wants to believe it was suicide -- not her father, not former U.S. senator Jack Mercier, and not private detective Charlie Parker, who has been hired to investigate the young woman's untimely death.

But when a mass grave is accidentally discovered nearby, revealing the grim truth behind the disappearance of a religious community known as the Aroostook Baptists, Parker realizes that their deaths and the violent passing of Grace Peltier are part of the same mystery, one that has its roots in her family history and in the origins of the shadowy organization known as the...