Rainey Teague disappears on his way home from school, literally vanishing into thin air. He's there one moment and gone the next, captured on security cameras. After he is found, the nightmare only gets deeper, especially for detective Nick Kavanaugh and his wife, Kate, a family practice lawyer. They have all been drawn into a shadow world between life and death--a world where a man killed on Friday night is in a duel on Sunday, where an armed robbery triggers a disastrous cascade of events that ricochets across twenty different lives, and where Nick and Kate will come face to face with the ancient force of anger and evil that lurks beneath Niceville.