A memory has stuck in Etly Pine’s mind like a steel splinter: she was six, and an intruder in their house chooses—using a child’s counting rhyme—between her and Mercy, her twin sister. In the end, he stops on Mercy and takes her away. Etly never saw her sister again…
Thirty years later, FBI special agent Pine, desperate to get a confession out of the maniac she believes to be Mercy’s kidnapper, returns to the scene of that long-ago tragedy. The childhood house in the town of Andersonville, Georgia—her last hope. But her personal investigation, no matter how vital, will have to wait. Here, in this backwater where nothing special has happened since “Gone with the Wind,” a truly baffling murder occurs: a young woman isn’t just brutally deprived of her life—afterward, she’s dressed in an antique bridal veil…