The players call it the Game, and its aim is simple: to abduct and kill a stranger without getting caught. They’re very good at it. They’ve been playing it for a long time. And they can keep playing so long as everyone stick to the rules: No Killing Close to Home and No Killing Outside the Game. But those rules have been broken. When the drowned body of a troubled teenager is recovered from a river in Maine’s Kennebec Valley, and a young woman disappears from a small rural town, they draw the attention of the private investigator named Charlie Parker. Now Parker will be forced to confront a band of men without morality and without loyalty, not even to one another, in a place where the very darkness is alive. Because something has emerged from the shadows, something very bad. And it wants revenge.